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he. ar, NOMER _ BES’ : BI RAPHY ( '
Toh IN ONE VOLUME ~

IAN
KERSHAW

‘hth

PENGUIN BOOKS

HITLER

IAN KERSHAW is Professor of Modern History at the University of
Sheffield. For services to history he was given the German award of
the Federal Cross of Merit in 1994. He was knighted in 2002 and
awarded the Norton Medlicott Medal by the Historical Association
in 2004.

He was the historical adviser to three BBC series: The Nazis: A
Warning from History, War of the Century and Auschwitz.

His most recent books are Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris and Hitler 1936—
1945: Nemesis, which received the Wolfson Literary Award for
History and the Bruno Kreisky Prize in Austria for the Political Book
of the Year, and was joint winner of the inaugrual British Academy
Book Prize; Making Friends with Hitler: Lord Londonderry and Britain’s
Road to War, which won the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical
Biography in 2005; and Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions that Changed
the World, 1940-41.

IAN KERSHAW

Hitler

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London wc2R orL, England
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London, wc2R oRL, England
www.penguin.com

Hitler, 1889-1936: Hubris first published 1998
Hitler, 1936-1945: Nemesis first published 2000
This one-volume abridgement with a new Preface first published by Allen Lane 2008
Published in Penguin Books 2009

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall
not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated
without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in
which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being
imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-190959-2

Contents

List of Illustrations
Glossary of Abbreviations
Maps

Preface to the New Edition
Reflecting on Hitler

1 Fantasy and Failure

2 Drop-out

3 Elation and Embitterment

4 The Beerhall Agitator

5 The ‘Drummer’

6 Emergence of the Leader

7 Mastery over the Movement
8 Breakthrough

9 Levered into Power

10 The Making of the Dictator
11 Securing Total Power

12 Working Towards the Fuhrer
13 Ceaseless Radicalization

14 The Drive for Expansion

15 Marks of a Genocidal Mentality
16 Going for Broke

17 Licensing Barbarism

18 Zenith of Power

19 Designing a ‘War of Annihilation’
20 Showdown

21 Fulfilling the ‘Prophecy’

22 Last Big Throw of the Dice
23 Beleaguered

24 Hoping for Miracles

25 Luck of the Devil

26 No Way Out

27 Into the Abyss

28 Extinction

Epilogue

Main Published Primary Sources on Hitler
Index

List of Illustrations

Every effort has been made to contact all copyright holders. The
publishers will be glad to make good in future editions any errors or
omissions brought to their attention. (Photographic
acknowledgements are given in brackets.)

1. Adolf Hitler in his Leonding school photo (Bayerische
Staatsbibliothek, Munich)

2. Klara Hitler (Ullstein Bilderdienst, Berlin)

3. Alois Hitler (Ullstein Bilderdienst, Berlin)

4. Karl Lueger (Hulton Getty, London)

5. August Kubizek (The Wiener Library, London)

6. The crowd in Odeonsplatz, Munich, 2 August 1914 (Bayerische
Staatsbibliothek, Munich)

7. Hitler with Ernst Schmidt and Anton Bachmann (Bildarchiv
Preufsischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin)

8. German soldiers on the Western Front (Hulton Getty, London)

9. Armed members of the KPD Sektion Neuhausen (Bayerische
Staatsbibliothek, Munich)

10. Counter-revolutionary Freikorps troops entering Munich
(Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich)

11. Anton Drexler (Hulton Getty, London)

12. Ernst Rohm (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich)

13. Hitler’s DAP membership card (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek,
Munich)

14. Hitler speaking on the Marsfeld (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek,
Munich)

15. NSDAP mass meeting, Munich, 1923 (Collection Rudolf Herz,
Munich)

16. Paramilitary organizations on ‘German Day’, 1923 (Collection
Rudolf Herz, Munich)

17. Alfred Rosenberg, Hitler, Friedrich Weber and Christian Weber
(Bildarchiv Preuischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin)

18. Armed SA men manning a barricade (Siiddeutscher Verlag,
Munich)

19. Armed putschists from the area around }
Landeshaupstadt Munich)

20. Defendants at the trial of the putschists (Bayerische
Staatsbibliothek, Munich)

21. Hitler immediately after his release from imprisonment
(Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich)

22. Hitler in Landsberg (Bibliothek fiir Zeitgeschichte, Stuttgart)

23. Hitler in Bavarian costume (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek,
Munich)

24. Hitler in a raincoat (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich)

25. Hitler with his alsatian, Wolf (Collection Rudolf Herz, Munich)

26. The Party Rally, Weimar, July 1926 (Ullstein Bilderdienst,
Berlin)

27. The Party Rally, Nuremberg, August 1927 (Bayerische
Staatsbibliothek, Munich)

28. Hitler in SA uniform (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich)

29. Hitler in rhetorical pose (Karl Stehle, Munich)

30. Hitler speaking to the NSDAP leadership (Bildarchiv
Preufischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin)

31. Geli Raubal and Hitler (David Gainsborough Roberts)

32. Eva Braun (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich)

33. Reich President Paul von Hindenburg (AKG London)

34. Reich Chancellor Heinrich Briining with Benito Mussolini (AKG
London)

35. Reich Chancellor Franz von Papen with State Secretary Dr Otto
Meissner (Bundesarchiv, Koblenz)

Aunich (Stadtsmuseum,

36. Gregor Strasser and Joseph Goebbels (Bayerische
Staatsbibliothek, Munich)

37. Ernst Thalmann (Hulton Getty, London)

38. Nazi election poster, 1932 (AKG London)

39. Candidate placards for the presidential election (Bundesarchiv,
Koblenz)

40. Discussion at Neudeck (AKG London)

41. Reich Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher (AKG London)

42. Hitler in evening dress (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich)

43. Hitler bows to Reich President von Hindenburg (AKG London)

44. SA violence against Communists (AKG London)

45. The boycott of Jewish doctors (AKG London)

46. An elderly Jew being taken into custody (AKG London)

47. Hindenburg and Hitler on the ‘Day of National Labour’ (AKG
London)

48. Hitler with Ernst Rohm (Siiddeutscher Verlag, Munich)

49. Postcard designed by Hans von Norden (Karl Stehle, Munich)

50. Postcard: ‘The Fiihrer as animal-lover’ (Karl Stehle, Munich)

51. Hitler justifying the ‘Rohm purge’ (Bildarchiv Preufsischer
Kulturbesitz, Berlin)

52. Hitler, Professor Leonhard Gall, and architect Albert Speer
(Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich)

53. Hitler with young Bavarians (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek,

54. The Mercedes-Benz showroom at Lenbachplatz, Munich (Stadt-
archiv, Landeshauptstadt Munich)

55. Hitler with Karl Krause, Albert Vogler, Fritz Thyssen and
Walter Borbet (AKG London)

56. ‘Hitler in his Mountains’: Heinrich Hoffmann publication
(Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich)

57. New recruits at the Feldherrnhalle, 1935 (Bayerische
Staatsbibliothek, Munich)

58. German troops entering the Rhineland (AKG London)

59. Adolf Hitler, September 1936 (Ullstein Bilderdienst, Berlin)
Deutsch Collection)

61. The Berlin Olympics, 1936 (Ullstein Bilderdienst, Berlin)

62. Hitler meets the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, 1937 (Corbis/
Hulton-Deutsch Collection)

63. Werner von Blomberg (Corbis/Hulton-Deutsch Collection)

64. Werner von Fritsch (Bibliothek fiir Zeitgeschichte, Stuttgart)

65. Hitler addresses crowds in the Heldenplatz, Vienna, 1938 (AKG
London)

66. Hitler, Mussolini and Victor-Emmanuel III, 1938 (Bibliothek fiir
Zeitgeschichte, Stuttgart)

67. Hitler in Florence, 1938 (Bibliothek fiir Zeitgeschichte,
Stuttgart)

68. ‘The Eternal Jew’ exhibition, Munich, 1937 (AKG London)

69. ‘Jews in Berlin’ poster, Berlin, 1938 (Corbis/Bettmann)

70. Synagogue on fire, Berlin, 1938 (Corbis/Hulton-Deutsch
Collection)

71. Jewish Community building, Kassel, 1938 (Ullstein
Bilderdienst, Berlin)

72. Looted Jewish shop, Berlin, 1938 (AKG London)

73. Joseph Goebbels and his family, 1936 (Corbis/Hulton-Deutsch
Collection)

74. Goebbels broadcasting to the people, 1939 (Hulton Getty)

75. Eva Braun, c.1938 (Hulton Getty)

76. Wilhelm Keitel greets Neville Chamberlain (Bibliothek fiir
Zeitgeschichte, Stuttgart)

77. German troops, Prague, 1939 (Bibliothek fur Zeitgeschichte,
Stuttgart)

78. Hitler’s study in the Reich Chancellery (Bibliothek fiir
Zeitgeschichte, Stuttgart)

79. Goring addresses Hitler in the New Reich Chancellery, 1939
(Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Munich)

80. Hitler presented with a model by Ferdinand Porsche, 1938
(Hulton Getty)

81. Heinrich Himmler presents Hitler with a painting by Menzel,
1939 (Bundesarchiv, Koblenz)

82. Hitler with Winifred Wagner, Bayreuth, 1939 (Bayerisches
Hauptstaatsarchiv, Munich)

83. Molotov signs the Non-Aggression Pact between the Soviet
Union and Germany, 1939 (Corbis)

84. Hitler in Poland with his Wehrmacht adjutants (Bibliothek fiir
Zeitgeschichte, Stuttgart)

85. Hitler reviewing troops in Warsaw, 1939 (Bibliothek fiir
Zeitgeschichte, Stuttgart)

86. Hitler addresses the Party’s ‘Old Guard’ at the
Birgerbraukeller, Munich, 1939 (Bibliothek fiir Zeitgeschichte,
Stuttgart)

87. Arthur Greiser (Bundesarchiv, Koblenz)

88. Albert Forster (Siiddeutscher Verlag, Munich)

89. Hitler reacting to news of France’s request for an armistice,
1940 (Bibliothek fiir Zeitgeschichte, Stuttgart)

90. Hitler visiting the Maginot Line in Alsace, 1940 (Bibliothek fiir
Zeitgeschichte, Stuttgart)

91. Hitler in Freudenstadt, 1940 (Bibliothek fiir Zeitgeschichte,
Stuttgart)

92. Crowds in the Wilhelmplatz, Berlin, 1940 (Bibliothek fur
Zeitgeschichte, Stuttgart)

93. Hitler bids farewell to Franco, Hendaye, 1940 (Ullstein
Bilderdienst, Berlin)

94. Hitler meets Marshal Pétain, 1940 (Bibliothek fiir
Zeitgeschichte, Stuttgart)

95. Ribbentrop talking to Molotov, Berlin, 1940 (Bildarchiv
Preufsischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin)

96. Hitler meets Matsuoka of Japan, 1941 (Bibliothek fiir
Zeitgeschichte, Stuttgart)

97. Hitler talks to Alfred Jodl, 1941 (Bibliothek fiir Zeitgeschichte,
Stuttgart)

98. Hitler and Keitel, en route to Angerburg, 1941 (Ullstein
Bilderdienst, Berlin/Walter Frentz)

99. ‘Europe’s Victory is Your Prosperity’, anti-Bolshevik poster
(Imperial War Museum, London)

100. Walther von Brauchitsch and Franz Halder (AKG London)

101. Keitel with Hitler at the Wolf’s Lair (Bibliothek fiir
Zeitgeschichte, Stuttgart)

102. Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich (Siiddeutscher Verlag,
Munich)

103. Nazi propaganda poster featuring Hitler’s ‘prophecy’ of 30
January 1939 (The Wiener Library, London)

104. Hitler salutes the coffin of Heydrich, 1942 (Bibliothek fiir
Zeitgeschichte, Stuttgart)

105. Hitler comforts Heydrich’s sons (Bibliothek fiir Zeitgeschichte,
Stuttgart)

106. Hitler addresses 12,000 officers at the Sportpalast, Berlin, 1942
(Bibliothek fiir Zeitgeschichte, Stuttgart)

107. The officers reacting (Bibliothek fiir Zeitgeschichte, Stuttgart)

108. Fedor von Bock (Ullstein Bilderdienst, Berlin/Walter Frentz)

109. Erich von Manstein (Ullstein Bilderdienst, Berlin/Walter
Frentz)

110. Hitler speaks at ‘Heroes’ Memorial Day’ at the Armoury on
Unter den Linden, Berlin, 1942 (Bibliothek fiir Zeitgeschichte,
Stuttgart)

111. Motorized troops pass a burning Russian village on the Eastern
Front, 1942 (Hulton Getty)

112. Hitler greets Dr Ante Pavelic, 1943 (Bibliothek fiir
Zeitgeschichte, Stuttgart)

113. Hitler with Marshal Antonescu, 1942 (Bibliothek fiir
Zeitgeschichte, Stuttgart)

114. Hitler greets King Boris III, 1942 (Bibliothek fiir
Zeitgeschichte, Stuttgart)

115. Hitler greets Monsignor Dr Josef Tiso, 1943 (Bibliothek fiir
Zeitgeschichte, Stuttgart)

116. Hitler greets Marshal Mannerheim, 1942 (Bibliothek fiir
Zeitgeschichte, Stuttgart)

117. Admiral Horthy speaks with Ribbentrop, Keitel and Martin
Bormann (Bibliothek fiir Zeitgeschichte, Stuttgart)

118. A ‘Do 24’ seaplane, Norway (Bibliothek fiir Zeitgeschichte,
Stuttgart)

119. Train-mounted cannon, Leningrad (Bibliothek fiir
Zeitgeschichte, Stuttgart)

120. German tanks, Cyrenaica, Libya (Hulton Getty)

121. Hunting partisans, Bosnia (Bibliothek fiir Zeitgeschichte,
Stuttgart)

122. Exhausted German soldier, the Eastern Front (Bibliothek fiir
Zeitgeschichte, Stuttgart)

123. Hitler reviewing the Wehrmacht parade, Berlin, 1943 (Ullstein
Bilderdienst, Berlin/Walter Frentz)

124. The Party’s ‘Old Guard’ salute Hitler, Munich, 1943 (Bibliothek
fiir Zeitgeschichte, Stuttgart)

125. Martin Bormann (Hulton Getty)

126. Hitler and Goebbels on the Obersalzberg, 1943 (Ullstein
Bilderdienst, Berlin/Walter Frentz)

127. German soldiers pushing vehicle through mud, the Eastern
Front (Corbis)

128. Armoured vehicles lodged in snow, the Eastern Front
(Bibliothek fiir Zeitgeschichte, Stuttgart)

129. Waffen-SS troops, the Eastern Front (Bibliothek fiir
Zeitgeschichte, Stuttgart)

130. French Jews being deported, 1942 (Bildarchiv Preufischer
Kulturbesitz, Berlin)

131. Polish Jews dig their own grave, 1942 (Bildarchiv Preuf§ischer
Kulturbesitz, Berlin)

132. Incinerators at Majdanek, 1944 (Ullstein Bilderdienst, Berlin)

133. Hitler and Himmler walking on the Obersalzberg, 1944
(Ullstein Bilderdienst, Berlin/Walter Frentz)

134. The ‘White Rose’, 1942 (Gedenkstatte Deutscher Widerstand,
Berlin)

135. Heinz Guderian (Hulton Getty)

136. Ludwig Beck (AKG London)

137. Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg (AKG London)

138. Henning von Tresckow (Stiddeutscher Verlag, Munich)

139. Hitler just after the assassination attempt, 1944 (Stiddeutscher
Verlag, Munich)

140. Hitler’s trousers (Bibliothek fiir Zeitgeschichte, Stuttgart)

141. Last meeting of Hitler and Mussolini, 1944 (Bibliothek fiir
Zeitgeschichte, Stuttgart)

142. Karl Donitz professes the loyalty of the Navy, 1944 (Bibliothek
fiir Zeitgeschichte, Stuttgart)

143. An ageing Hitler at the Berghof, 1944 (Ullstein Bilderdienst,
Berlin/ Walter Frentz)

144. V1 flying-bomb (Bibliothek fiir Zeitgeschichte, Stuttgart)

145. V2 rocket (Corbis/Hulton-Deutsch Collection)

146. Messerschmitt Me262 (Hulton Getty)

147. The ‘Volkssturm’, 1944 (Hulton Getty)

148. The last ‘Heroes’ Memorial Day’, Berlin, 1945 (Bibliothek fiir
Zeitgeschichte, Stuttgart)

149. Women and children fleeing Danzig, 1945 (AKG London)

150. Hitler views a model of Linz (National Archives and Records
Administration, Washington)

151. Hitler in the ruins of the Reich Chancellery, 1945 (Bibliothek
fiir Zeitgeschichte, Stuttgart)

BVP
DAP
DDP

DNVP

DSP
DSVB

DVFP

DVP
FHQ
KPD

NSDAP

NSFB

NSFP

NS-Hago

OKH

Glossary of Abbreviations

Bayerische Volkspartei (Bavarian People’s Party)
Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (German Workers’ Party)

Deutsche Demokratische Partei (German Democratic
Party)

Deutschnationale Volkspartei (German National People’s
Party)

Deutschsozialistische Partei (German-Socialist Party)

Deutschvolkische Freiheitsbewegung (German Folkish
Freedom Movement)

Deutschvolkische Freiheitspartei (German Folkish
Freedom Party)

Deutsche Volkspartei (German People’s Party)
Fuhrer Hauptquartier (Fluhrer Headquarters)

Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (Communist Party
of Germany)

Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (Nazi
Party)

Nationalsozialistische Freiheitsbewegung (National
Socialist Freedom Movement)

Nationalsozialistische Freiheitspartei (National Socialist
Freedom Party)

Nationalsozialistische Handwerks-, Handels- und
Gewerbe-organisation (Nazi Craft, Commerce, and Trade
Organization)

Oberkommando des Heeres (High Command of the
Army)

OKW
OT
RSHA
SA

SD
SPD

Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (armed services)
Organisation Todt

Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security Head Office)
Sturmabteilung (Storm Troop)

Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service)

Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Social
Democratic Party of Germany)

Schutzstaffel (lit. Protection Squad)

Maps

1 The legacy of the First World War

2 Poland under Nazi occupation

3 The Western offensive: the Sichelschnitt attack
4 The German Reich of 1942: the Nazi Party Gaue
5 Nazi occupied Europe

6 Limits of the German occupation of the USSR

7 The Western and Eastern fronts, 1944-5

8 The Soviet drive to Berlin

WN Territory lost by Germany f
VZZ/), Territory lost by USSR

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Post First World War
Boundaries

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Sudetenland
Protectorate of

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Bohemia

Lower Danube

Upper
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4. The German Reich of 1942: the Nazi Party Gaue

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6. Limits of the German occupation of the USSR

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15 December 1944

15 September 1944

yO Ps 3
\ Belgrade’,

Sent en ene near ttt ae?

Operations April—May 1945
[EF 1 Front tine 16 April

<__ Soviet thrusts 16-20 April
m8 8 a Front line 19 April

eam Soviet thrusts 20-26 April

eeeeee Front line 25 April

<Q Soviet thrusts 26 April-9 May
mm om Front line 8 May

4081 German counter-attacks

—
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=.
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a)
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S
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German Units

Panzer
Armies

(A) Armies (iD)

Panzer
Divisions

Infantry
Divisions

8. The Soviet drive to Berlin

Preface to the New Edition

It has been a source of immense satisfaction to me that the original
two-volume biography, Hitler, 1889-1936: Hubris, and Hitler, 1936-
1945: Nemesis, published in 1998 and 2000 respectively, was so well
received, as also in the numerous countries where foreign-language
editions were published. The warm reception in Germany was
particularly gratifying.

My biography was above all intended to be a study of Hitler’s
power. I set out to answer two questions. The first was how Hitler
had been possible. How could such a bizarre misfit ever have been
in a position to take power in Germany, a modern, complex,
economically developed, culturally advanced country? The second
was how, then, Hitler could exercise power. He had great
demagogic skills, certainly, and combined this with a sure eye for
exploiting ruthlessly the weakness of his opponents. But he was an
unsophisticated autodidact lacking all experience of government.
From 1933 he had to deal not just with Nazi roughnecks but with a
government machine and circles used to ruling. How could he then
so swiftly dominate the established political élites, go on to draw
Germany into a catastrophic high-risk gamble for European
domination with a terrible, unprecedented genocidal programme at
its heart, block all possibilities of a negotiated end to the conflict,
and finally kill himself only when the arch-enemy was at his very
door and his country physically and morally in total ruins?

I found the answer to these questions only partially in the
personality of the strange individual who presided over Germany’s
fate during those twelve long years. Of course, personality counts in
historical explanation. It would be foolish to suggest otherwise. And
Hitler, as those who admired him or reviled him agreed, was an
extraordinary personality (though, however varied and numerous
the attempts at explanation are, only speculation is possible on the

formative causes of his peculiar psychology). Hitler was not
interchangeable. The type of individual that Hitler was
unquestionably influenced crucial developments in decisive fashion.
A Reich Chancellor Goring, for instance, would not have acted in
the same way at numerous key junctures. It can be said with
certainty: without Hitler, history would have been different.

But Hitler’s disastrous impact cannot be explained through
personality alone. Before 1918, there had been no sign of the later
extraordinary personal magnetism. He was seen by those around
him as an oddity, at times a figure of mild scorn or ridicule,
definitively not as a future national leader in waiting. From 1919
onwards, all this changed. He now became the object of increasing,
ultimately almost boundless, mass adulation (as well as intense
hatred from his political enemies). This in itself suggests that the
answer to the riddle of his impact has to be found less in Hitler’s
personality than in the changed circumstances of a German society
traumatized by a lost war, revolutionary upheaval, political
instability, economic misery and cultural crisis. At any other time,
Hitler would surely have remained a nobody. But in those peculiar
circumstances, a symbiotic relationship of dynamic, and ultimately
destructive, nature emerged between the individual with a mission
to expunge the perceived national humiliation of 1918 and a society
ready more and more to see his leadership as vital to its future
salvation, to rescue it from the dire straits into which, in the eyes of
millions of Germans, defeat, democracy and depression had cast it.

To encapsulate this relationship, as the key to understanding how
Hitler could obtain, then exercise, his peculiar form of power, I
turned to the concept of ‘charismatic authority’, as devised by the
brilliant German sociologist Max Weber, who died before Hitler had
been heard of — at least outside Munich beerhalls. I did not
elaborate on this concept, which had figured prominently in my
writing on Hitler and the Third Reich over many years. It lay
unmistakably, however, at the heart of the inquiry. ‘Charismatic
authority’, as deployed by Weber, did not rest primarily on
demonstrable outstanding qualities of an individual. Rather, it

derived from the perception of such qualities among a ‘following’
which, amid crisis conditions, projected on to a chosen leader
unique ‘heroic’ attributes and saw in him personal greatness, the
embodiment of a ‘mission’ of salvation. ‘Charismatic authority’ is, in
Weber’s conceptualization, inherently unstable. Continued failure or
misfortune will bring its downfall; and it is under threat of
becoming ‘routinized’ into a systematic form of government.

Applying this concept of ‘charismatic authority’ seemed to me to
offer a useful way of tackling both of the central questions I had
posed. To my mind, the concept helps in evaluating the relationship
between Hitler and the mass following that shaped his rise — though
in conditions never, of course, imagined by Max Weber, and where
the image of ‘heroic’ leadership attached to Hitler, exploiting pre-
existing pseudo-religious expectations of national salvation, was in
good measure a manufactured propaganda product. And I also found
it invaluable in examining the way Hitler’s highly personalized rule
eroded systematic government and administration and was
incompatible with it. Of course, by the middle of the war, Hitler’s
popularity was in steep decline and any ‘charismatic’ hold over
government and society was now waning sharply. By this time,
however, Germany had been wedded for a decade or so to Hitler’s
‘charismatic’ domination. Those who owed their own positions of
power to Hitler’s supreme ‘Fuhrer authority’ still upheld it, whether
from conviction or necessity. They had risen with Hitler. Now they
were condemned to fall with him. He had left them no way out.
Hitler’s authority within the regime started to crumble only as
Germany faced imminent and total defeat. And as long as he lived,
he posed an insuperable barrier to the only way the war he had
brought about could be ended: his country’s capitulation.

I linked ‘charismatic authority’ to another concept as a way of
showing how Hitler’s highly personalized form of rule functioned.
This, as referred to in the text and operating as a kind of leitmotiv
throughout the biography, was the notion of ‘working towards the
Fuhrer’, which I tried to use to show how Hitler’s presumed aims
served to prompt, activate or legitimate initiatives at different

levels of the regime, driving on, consciously or unwittingly, the
destructive dynamic of Nazi rule. I did not mean, with this notion,
to suggest that people at all times asked themselves what Hitler
wanted then tried to put it into practice. Some, of course, especially
among the party faithful, did more or less just that. But many others
— say in boycotting a Jewish shop to protect a rival business, or
denouncing a neighbour to the police on account of some personal
grievance — were not asking themselves what the Fthrer’s intentions
might be, or operating from ideological motivation. They were,
nevertheless, in minor ways, helping to sustain and promote
ideological goals represented by Hitler and thereby indirectly
promoting the process of radicalization by which those goals — in
this case, ‘racial cleansing’ of German society — gradually came
more sharply into view as realizable short-term aims rather than
distant objectives.

The approach I chose meant the two volumes were necessarily
long. But even beyond the text itself there was much to be added. I
was keen to provide full reference to the extensive documentary
sources — both archival and printed primary sources, and the wealth
of secondary literature I had used — first, so that other researchers
could follow these up and re-examine them if need be, and second
to remove distortions in some accounts or dispose of myths which
had attached themselves to Hitler. At times, the notes became in
themselves minor excursions on points of detail which could not be
expanded in the text, or offered additional commentary upon it. I
provided lengthy notes in Hubris, for example, elaborating on points
of interpretation in historiography, and on differing views of
Hitler’s psychology; and in Nemesis on the authenticity of the text of
the final ‘table talk’ monologues of early 1945 and on the complex
(and sometimes conflicting) evidence about the circumstances of
Hitler’s death and Soviet discovery of his remains. All of this meant
that the two finished volumes became massive in size, totalling over
1,450 pages of text and almost 450 pages of notes and bibliography.
Of course, not all readers are able to devote sufficient time and

energy to a work of such length. And, naturally, not all readers are
interested in the scholarly apparatus.

After much consideration, I decided, therefore, to produce this
condensed edition. On undertaking it, I was reminded of the
passage in the film Amadeus, where the Kaiser tells Mozart that he
likes his opera — apart from the fact that it contains too many notes.
‘Too many notes, Majesty?’ an indignant Mozart interjects. “There
are neither too many, nor too few. Just exactly the right number.’
That is more or less how I felt about my original two volumes.
These took the form and shape that they did because I wanted to
write them in exactly that way. So the drastic pruning that has gone
into the present edition — losing over 650 pages (more than 300,000
words) of text and the entire scholarly apparatus — was nothing if
not painful. And of course, it goes against the grain for a historian
to produce a text lacking references and scholarly apparatus. But I
console myself that the notes and bibliographical references are all
there for consultation by those who want to check them in the full
text of the two-volume original version, which will remain in print.
And the abridged text, though greatly shortened to create this
single, more approachable volume, stays completely true to the
original. I have cut out much which provided context, eliminated
numerous illustrative examples, shortened or removed many
quotations, and deleted some entire sections which described the
general social and political climate or the setting in which Hitler
operated. In two cases, I have blended chapters together. Otherwise
the structure is identical with the originals. The essence of the book
remains completely intact. I did not want to, and saw no need to,
change the overall interpretation. And, in an exercise devoted to
reducing the size of the text, I naturally did not want to add to its
length. Apart from insignificant wording adjustments, I have
incorporated only one or two minor amendments to what I had
written earlier. Since the original notes have been excluded, there
seemed no point in including the lengthy bibliographies in the
original two volumes of works I had used. I have, however,
provided a selection of the most important printed primary sources

for a biography of Hitler, on all of which (apart from a couple of
recent publications) I drew. Most are, of course, in German, though
I add where relevant a reference to English translations.

My many debts of gratitude remain unchanged from the lists of
acknowledgements in Hubris and Nemesis. In addition, however, I
would like to add my thanks in connection with this edition to
Andrew Wylie, and to Simon Winder and the excellent team at
Penguin. It is a great pleasure, finally, to add Olivia to the family
roster alongside Sophie, Joe and Ella, and to thank, as always,
David and Katie, Stephen and Becky, and, of course, Betty, for their
love and continuing support.

Ian Kershaw
Manchester/Sheffield, August 2007

Reflecting on Hitler

Hitler’s dictatorship has the quality of a paradigm for the twentieth
century. In extreme and intense fashion it reflected, among other
things, the total claim of the modern state, unforeseen levels of
state repression and violence, previously unparalleled manipulation
of the media to control and mobilize the masses, unprecedented
cynicism in international relations, the acute dangers of ultra-
nationalism, and the immensely destructive power of ideologies of
racial superiority and ultimate consequences of racism, alongside
the perverted usage of modern technology and ‘social engineering’.
Above all, it lit a warning beacon that still burns brightly: it showed
how a modern, advanced, cultured society can so rapidly sink into
barbarity, culminating in ideological war, conquest of scarcely
imaginable brutality and rapaciousness, and genocide such as the
world had never previously witnessed. Hitler’s dictatorship
amounted to the collapse of modern civilization — a form of nuclear
blow-out within modern society. It showed what we are capable of.

The century which, in a sense, his name dominated gained much
of its character by war and genocide — Hitler’s hallmarks. What
happened under Hitler took place — in fact, could only have taken
place — in the society of a modern, cultured, technologically
advanced, and highly bureaucratic country. Within only a few years
of Hitler becoming head of government, this sophisticated country
in the heart of Europe was working towards what turned out to be
an apocalyptic genocidal war that left Germany and Europe not just
riven by an Iron Curtain and physically in ruins, but morally
shattered. That still needs explaining. The combination of a
leadership committed to an ideological mission of national
regeneration and racial purification; a society with sufficient belief
in its Leader to work towards the goals he appeared to strive for;
and a skilled bureaucratic administration capable of planning and

implementing policy, however inhumane, and keen to do so, offers
a starting-point. How and why this society could be galvanized by
Hitler requires, even so, detailed examination.

It would be convenient to look no further, for the cause of
Germany’s and Europe’s calamity, than the person of Adolf Hitler
himself, ruler of Germany from 1933 to 1945, whose philosophies
of breathtaking inhumanity had been publicly advertised almost
eight years before he became Reich Chancellor. But, for all Hitler’s
prime moral responsibility for what took place under his
authoritarian regime, a personalized explanation would be a gross
short-circuiting of the truth. Hitler could be said to provide a classic
illustration of Karl Marx’s dictum that ‘men do make their own
history ... but ... under given and imposed conditions’. How far
‘given and imposed conditions’, impersonal developments beyond
the control of any individual, however powerful, shaped Germany’s
destiny; how much can be put down to contingency, even historical
accident; what can be attributed to the actions and motivations of
the extraordinary man ruling Germany at the time: all need
investigation. All form part of the following inquiry. Simple
answers are not possible.

Since he first entered the limelight in the 1920s, Hitler has been
viewed in many different and varied fashions, often directly
contrasting with each other. He has been seen, for example, as no
more than ‘an opportunist entirely without principle’, ‘barren of all
ideas save one — the further extension of his own power and that of
the nation with which he had identified himself’, preoccupied solely
with ‘domination, dressed up as the doctrine of race’, and consisting
of nothing but ‘vindictive destructiveness’. In complete contrast, he
has been portrayed as fanatically driving on a pre-planned and pre-
ordained ideological programme. There have been attempts to see
him as a type of political con-man, hypnotizing and bewitching the
German people, leading them astray and into disaster, or to
‘demonize’ him — turning him into a mystical, inexplicable figure of
Germany’s destiny. No less a figure than Albert Speer, Hitler’s
architect, then Armaments Minister, for much of the Third Reich as

close to the Dictator as anyone, described him soon after the end of
the war as a ‘demonic figure’, ‘one of those inexplicable historical
phenomena which emerge at rare intervals among mankind’, whose
‘person determined the fate of the nation’. Such a view runs the risk
of mystifying what happened in Germany between 1933 and 1945,
reducing the cause of Germany’s and Europe’s catastrophe to the
arbitrary whim of a demonic personality. The genesis of the
calamity finds no explanation outside the actions of an
extraordinary individual. Complex developments become no more
than an expression of Hitler’s will.

An absolutely contrary view — tenable only so long as it was part
of a state ideology and consequently evaporating as soon as the
Soviet bloc which had sustained it collapsed — rejected out of hand
any significant role of personality, relegating Hitler to no more than
the status of an agent of capitalism, a cypher for the interests of big
business and its leaders who controlled him and pulled the strings of
their marionette.

Some accounts of Hitler have scarcely recognized any problem at
all of understanding, or have promptly ruled one out. Ridiculing
Hitler has been one approach. Describing him simply as a ‘lunatic’
or ‘raving maniac’ obviates the need for an explanation — though it
of course leaves open the key question: why a complex society
would be prepared to follow someone who was mentally deranged,
a ‘pathological’ case, into the abyss.

Far more sophisticated approaches have clashed on the extent to
which Hitler was actually ‘master in the Third Reich’, or could even
be described as ‘in some respects a weak dictator’. Did he in fact
exercise total, unrestricted, and sole power? Or did his regime rest
on a hydra-like ‘polycracy’ of power-structures, with Hitler, on
account of his undeniable popularity and the cult that surrounded
him, as its indispensable fulcrum but little else - remaining no more
than the propagandist he had in essence always been, exploiting
opportunities as they came along, though without programme, plan,
or design?

Differing views about Hitler have never been purely a matter of
arcane academic debate. They have wider currency than that — and
more far-reaching implications. When Hitler was put forward as a
sort of reverse copy of Lenin and Stalin, a leader whose paranoid
fear of Bolshevik terror, of class genocide, motivated him to
perpetrate race genocide, the implications were plain. Hitler was
wicked, no doubt, but less wicked than Stalin. His was the copy,
Stalin’s the original. The underlying cause of Nazi race genocide was
Soviet class genocide. It also mattered when the spotlight was
turned away from the crimes against humanity for which Hitler
bears ultimate responsibility and on to his ruminations on the
transformation of German society. This Hitler was interested in
social mobility, better housing for workers, modernizing industry,
erecting a welfare system, sweeping away the reactionary privileges
of the past; in sum, building a better, more up-to-date, less class-
ridden, German society, however brutal the methods. This Hitler
was, despite his demonization of Jews and gamble for world power
against mighty odds, ‘a politician whose thinking and actions were
far more rational than up to now thought’. From such a perspective,
Hitler could be seen as wicked, but with good intentions for German
society — or at least intentions which could be viewed in a positive
light.

Such revised interpretations were not meant to be apologetic. The
comparison of Nazi and Stalinist crimes against humanity was
intended, however distorted the approach, to shed light on the
terrible ferocity of ideological conflict in inter-war Europe and the
motive forces of the German genocide. The depiction of Hitler as a
social-revolutionary was attempting to explain, perhaps in
somewhat misconceived fashion, why he found such wide appeal in
Germany in a time of social crisis. But it is not hard to see that both
approaches contain, however unwittingly, the potential for a
possible rehabilitation of Hitler which could begin to see him,
despite the crimes against humanity associated with his name, as
nevertheless a great leader of the twentieth century, one who, had

he died before the war, would have had a high place in the
pantheon of German heroes.

The question of ‘historical greatness’ was usually implicit in the
writing of conventional biography — particularly so in the German
tradition. The figure of Hitler, whose personal attributes —
distinguished from his political aura and impact — were scarcely
noble, elevating or enriching, posed self-evident problems for such a
tradition. A way round it was to imply that Hitler possessed a form
of ‘negative greatness’; that, while he lacked the nobility of
character and other attributes taken to pertain to ‘greatness’ in
historical figures, his impact on history was undeniably immense,
even if catastrophic. Yet ‘negative greatness’ can also be taken to
have tragic connotations — mighty endeavour and astounding
achievements vitiated; national grandeur turned into national
catastrophe.

It seems better to avoid altogether the issue of ‘greatness’ (other
than seeking to understand why so many contemporaries saw
‘greatness’ in Hitler). It is a red-herring: misconstrued, pointless,
irrelevant, and potentially apologetic. Misconstrued because, as
‘great men’ theories cannot escape doing, it personalizes the
historical process in extreme fashion. Pointless because the whole
notion of historical greatness is in the last resort futile. Based on a
subjective set of moral and even aesthetic judgements, it is a
philosophical-ethical concept which leads nowhere. Irrelevant
because, whether we were to answer the question of Hitler’s alleged
‘greatness’ in the affirmative or the negative, it would in itself
explain nothing whatsoever about the terrible history of the Third
Reich. And potentially apologetic, because even to pose the question
cannot conceal a certain admiration for Hitler, however grudging
and whatever his faults; and because, to look for greatness in Hitler
bears the almost automatic corollary of reducing in effect those who
directly promoted his rule, those agencies which sustained it, and
the German people themselves who gave it so much backing, to the
role of mere supernumeraries to the ‘great man’.

Rather than the issue of ‘historical greatness’, we need to turn our
attention to another question, one of far greater importance. How
do we explain how someone with so few intellectual gifts and social
attributes, someone no more than an empty vessel outside his
political life, unapproachable and impenetrable even for those in his
close company, incapable it seems of genuine friendship, without
the background that bred high office, without even any experience
of government before becoming Reich Chancellor, could
nevertheless have such an immense historical impact, could make
the entire world hold its breath?

Perhaps the question is, in part at least, falsely posed. For one
thing, Hitler was certainly not unintelligent, and possessed a sharp
mind which could draw on his formidably retentive memory. He
was able to impress not only, as might be expected, his sycophantic
entourage but also cool, critical, seasoned statesmen and diplomats
with his rapid grasp of issues. His rhetorical talent was, of course,
recognized even by his political enemies. And he is certainly not
alone among twentieth-century state leaders in combining what we
might see as deficiencies of character and shallowness of intellectual
development with notable political skill and effectiveness. It is as
well to avoid the trap, which most of his contemporaries fell into,
of grossly underestimating his abilities.

Moreover, others beside Hitler have climbed from humble
backgrounds to high office. But if his rise from utter anonymity is
not entirely unique, the problem posed by Hitler remains. One
reason is the emptiness of the private person. He was, as has
frequently been said, tantamount to an ‘unperson’. There is,
perhaps, an element of conde scension in this judgement, a
readiness to look down on the vulgar, uneducated upstart lacking a
rounded personality, the outsider with half-baked opinions on
everything under the sun, the uncultured self-appointed adjudicator
on culture. Partly, too, the black hole which represents the private
individual derives from the fact that Hitler was highly secretive —
not least about his personal life, his background, and his family. The
secrecy and detachment were features of his character, applying

also to his political behaviour; they were also politically important,
components of the aura of ‘heroic’ leadership he had consciously
allowed to be built up, intensifying the mystery about himself. Even
so, when all qualifications are made, it remains the case that outside
politics (and a blinkered passion for cultural grandeur and power in
music, art and architecture) Hitler’s life was largely a void.

A biography of an ‘unperson’, one who has as good as no personal
life or history outside that of the political events in which he is
involved, imposes, naturally, its own limitations. But the drawbacks
exist only as long as it is presumed that the private life is decisive
for the public life. Such a presumption would be a mistake. There
was no ‘private life’ for Hitler. Of course, he could enjoy his
escapist films, his daily walk to the Tea House at the Berghof, his
time in his alpine idyll far from government ministries in Berlin. But
these were empty routines. There was no retreat to a sphere outside
the political, to a deeper existence which conditioned his public
reflexes. It was not that his ‘private life’ became part of his public
persona. On the contrary: so secretive did it remain that the German
people only learned of the existence of Eva Braun once the Third
Reich had crumbled into ashes. Rather, Hitler ‘privatized’ the public
sphere. ‘Private’ and ‘public’ merged completely and became
inseparable. Hitler’s entire being came to be subsumed within the
role he played to perfection: the role of ‘Fuhrer’.

The task of the biographer at this point becomes clearer. It is a
task which has to focus not upon the personality of Hitler, but
squarely and directly upon the character of his power — the power of
the Ftihrer.

That power derived only in part from Hitler himself. In greater
measure, it was a social product — a creation of social expectations
and motivations invested in Hitler by his followers. This does not
mean that Hitler’s own actions, in the context of his expanding
power, were not of the utmost importance at key moments. But the
impact of his power has largely to be seen not in any specific
attributes of ‘personality’, but in his role as Fuhrer — a role made
possible only through the underestimation, mistakes, weakness, and

collaboration of others. To explain his power, therefore, we must
look in the first instance to others, not to Hitler himself.

Hitler’s power was of an extraordinary kind. He did not base his
claim to power (except in a most formal sense) on his position as a
party leader, or on any functional position. He derived it from what
he saw as his historic mission to save Germany. His power, in other
words, was ‘charismatic’, not institutional. It depended upon the
readiness of others to see ‘heroic’ qualities in him. And they did see
those qualities — perhaps even before he himself came to believe in
them.

As one of the most brilliant contemporary analysts of the Nazi
phenomenon, Franz Neumann, noted: ‘Charismatic rule has long
been neglected and ridiculed, but apparently it has deep roots and
becomes a powerful stimulus once the proper psychological and
social conditions are set. The Leader’s charismatic power is not a
mere phantasm — none can doubt that millions believe in it.’ Hitler’s
own contribution to the expansion of this power and to its
consequences should not be underrated. A brief counter-factual
reflection underlines the point. Is it likely, we might ask, that a
terroristic police state such as that which developed under Himmler
and the SS would have been erected without Hitler as head of
government? Would Germany under a different leader, even an
authoritarian one, have been engaged by the end of the 1930s in
general European war? And would under a different head of state
discrimination against Jews (which would almost certainly have
taken place) have culminated in out-and-out genocide? The answer
to each of these questions would surely be ‘no’; or, at the very least,
‘highly unlikely’. Whatever the external circumstances and
impersonal determinants, Hitler was not interchangeable.

The highly personalized power which Hitler exercised
conditioned even shrewd and intelligent individuals — churchmen,
intellectuals, foreign diplomats, distinguished visitors — to be
impressed by him. They would not for the most part have been
captivated by the same sentiments expressed to a raucous crowd in
a Munich beerhall. But with the authority of the Reich

Chancellorship behind him, backed by adoring crowds, surrounded
by the trappings of power, enveloped by the aura of great
leadership trumpeted by propaganda, it was scarcely surprising that
others beyond the completely naive and gullible could find him
impressive. Power was also the reason why his underlings —
subordinate Nazi leaders, his personal retinue, provincial party
bosses — hung on his every word, before, when that power was at
an end in April 1945, fleeing like the proverbial rats from the
sinking ship. The mystique of power surely explains, too, why so
many women (especially those much younger than he was) saw
him, the Hitler whose person seems to us the antithesis of sexuality,
as a sex-symbol, several attempting suicide on his behalf.

A history of Hitler has to be, therefore, a history of his power —
how he came to get it, what its character was, how he exercised it,
why he was allowed to expand it to break all institutional barriers,
why resistance to that power was so feeble. But these are questions
to be directed at German society, not just at Hitler.

There is no necessity to play down the contribution to Hitler’s
gaining and exercise of power that derived from the ingrained
features of his character. Single-mindedness, inflexibility,
ruthlessness in discarding all hindrances, cynical adroitness, the all-
or-nothing gambler’s instinct for the highest stakes: each of these
helped shape the nature of his power. These features of character
came together in one overriding element in Hitler’s inner drive: his
boundless egomania. Power was Hitler’s aphrodisiac. For one as
narcissistic as he was, it offered purpose out of purposeless early
years, compensation for all the deeply felt setbacks of the first half
of his life — rejection as an artist, social bankruptcy taking him to a
Viennese doss-house, the falling apart of his world in the defeat and
revolution of 1918. Power was all-consuming for him. As one
perceptive observer commented in 1940, even before the triumph
over France: ‘Hitler is the potential suicide par excellence. He owns
no ties outside his own “ego” ... He is in the privileged position of
one who loves nothing and no one but himself ... So he can dare all
to preserve or magnify his power ... which alone stands between

him and speedy death.’ The thirst for personalized power of such
magnitude embraced an insatiable appetite for territorial conquest
amounting to an almighty gamble — against extremely heavy odds —
for a monopoly of power on the European continent and, later,
world power. The relentless quest for ever greater expansion of
power could contemplate no diminution, no confinement, no
restriction. It was, moreover, dependent upon the continuance of
what were taken to be ‘great achievements’. Lacking any capacity
for limitation, the progressive megalomania inevitably contained
the seeds of self-destruction for the regime Hitler led. The match
with his own inbuilt suicidal tendencies was perfect.

All-consuming though power was for Hitler, it was not a matter
of power for its own sake, devoid of content or meaning. Hitler was
not just a propagandist, a manipulator, a mobilizer. He was all
those. But he was also an ideologue of unshakeable convictions —
the most radical of the radicals as exponent of an internally
coherent (however repellent to us) ‘world-view’, acquiring its thrust
and potency from its combination of a very few basic ideas —
integrated by the notion of human history as the history of racial
struggle. His ‘world-view’ gave him a rounded explanation of the
ills of Germany and of the world, and how to remedy them. He held
to his ‘world-view’ unwaveringly from the early 1920s down to his
death in the bunker. It amounted to a utopian vision of national
redemption, not a set of middle-range policies. But it was not only
capable of incorporating within it all the different strands of Nazi
philosophy; combined with Hitler’s rhetorical skills, it also meant
that he soon became practically unchallengeable on any point of
party doctrine.

Hitler’s ideological goals, his actions, and his personal input into
the shaping of events need, then, to be accorded the most serious
attention. But they explain far from everything. What Hitler did not
do, did not instigate, but which was nevertheless set in train by the
initiatives of others is as vital as the actions of the Dictator himself
in understanding the fateful ‘cumulative radicalization’ of the
regime.

An approach which looks to the expectations and motivations of
German society (in all its complexity) more than to Hitler’s
personality in explaining the Dictator’s immense impact offers the
potential to explore the expansion of his power through the internal
dynamics of the regime he headed and the forces he unleashed. The
approach is encapsulated in the maxim enunciated by a Nazi
functionary in 1934 — providing in a sense a leitmotiv for the work
as a whole — that it was the duty of each person in the Third Reich
‘to work towards the Fithrer along the lines he would wish’ without
awaiting instruction from above. This maxim, put into practice, was
one of the driving-forces of the Third Reich, translating Hitler’s
loosely framed ideological goals into reality through initiatives
focused on working towards the fulfilment of the Dictator’s
visionary aims. Hitler’s authority was, of course, decisive. But the
initiatives which he sanctioned derived more often than not from
others.

Hitler was no tyrant imposed on Germany. Though he never
attained majority support in free elections, he was legally appointed
to power as Reich Chancellor just like his predecessors had been,
and became between 1933 and 1940 arguably the most popular
head of state in the world. Understanding this demands reconciling
the apparently irreconcilable: the personalized method of biography
and the contrasting approaches to the history of society (including
the structures of political domination). Hitler’s impact can only be
grasped through the era which created him (and was destroyed by
him). An interpretation must not only take full account of Hitler’s
ideological goals, his actions, and his personal input into the
shaping of events; it must at the same time locate these within the
social forces and political structures which permitted, shaped, and
promoted the growth of a system that came increasingly to hinge on
personalized, absolute power — with the disastrous effects that
flowed from it.

The Nazi assault on the roots of civilization was a defining
feature of the twentieth century. Hitler was the epicentre of that
assault. But he was its chief exponent, not its prime cause.

1
Fantasy and Failure

The first of many strokes of good fortune for Adolf Hitler took place
thirteen years before he was born. In 1876, the man who was to
become his father changed his name from Alois Schicklgruber to
Alois Hitler. Adolf can be believed when he said that nothing his
father had done had pleased him so much as to drop the coarsely
rustic name of Schicklgruber. Certainly, ‘Heil Schicklgruber’ would
have sounded an unlikely salutation to a national hero.

The Schicklgrubers had for generations been a peasant family,
smallholders in the Waldviertel, a picturesque but poor, hilly and
(as the name suggests) woody area in the most north-westerly part
of Lower Austria, bordering on Bohemia, whose inhabitants had
something of a reputation for being dour, hard-nosed, and
unwelcoming. Hitler’s father, Alois, had been born there on 7 June
1837, in the village of Strones, as the illegitimate child of Maria
Anna Schicklgruber, then forty-one years old and daughter of a poor
smallholder, Johann Schicklgruber, and baptized (as Aloys
Schicklgruber) in nearby Dollersheim the same day.

Hitler’s father was the first social climber in his family. In 1855,
by the time he was eighteen, Alois had gained employment at a
modest grade with the Austrian ministry of finance. For a young
man of his background and limited education, his advancement in
the years to come was impressive. After training, and passing the
necessary examination, he attained low-ranking supervisory status
in 1861 and a position in the customs service in 1864, becoming a
customs officer in 1870 before moving the following year to

Braunau am Inn, and attaining the post of customs inspector there in
1875.

A year later came the change of name. Alois, the social climber,
may have preferred the less rustic form of ‘Hitler’ (a variant
spelling of ‘Hiedler’, otherwise given as ‘Hietler’, Hiittler’, ‘Hitler’,
meaning ‘smallholder’, the surname of Johann Georg Hiedler, who
had later married Alois’s mother, apparently acknowledging
paternity). At any rate, Alois seemed well satisfied with his new
name, and from the final authorization in January 1877 always
signed himself ‘Alois Hitler’. His son was equally pleased with the
more distinctive form ‘Hitler’.

Klara Polzl, who was to become Adolf Hitler’s mother, was the
eldest of only three surviving children out of eleven — the other two
were Johanna and Theresia — from the marriage of Johanna Hittler,
eldest daughter of Johann Nepomuk Hiittler, with Johann Baptist
Polzl, also a smallholder in Spital. Klara herself grew up on the
adjacent farm to that of her grandfather Nepomuk. At the death of
his brother, Johann Georg Hiedler, Nepomuk had effectively
adopted Alois Schicklgruber. Klara’s mother, Johanna, and her aunt
Walburga had in fact been brought up with Alois in Nepomuk’s
house. Officially, after the change of name and legitimation in 1876,
Alois Hitler and Klara Polzl were second cousins. In that year, 1876,
aged sixteen, Klara Polzl left the family farm in Spital and moved to
Braunau am Inn to join the household of Alois Hitler as a maid.

By this time, Alois was a well-respected customs official in
Braunau. His personal affairs were, however, less well regulated
than his career. He would eventually marry three times, at first to a
woman much older than himself, Anna Glasserl, from whom he
separated in 1880, then to women young enough to be his
daughters. A premarital liaison and his last two marriages would
give him nine children, four of whom were to die in infancy. It was
a private life of above average turbulence — at least for a provincial
customs officer. When his second wife, Franziska (Fanni)
Matzelberger, died of tuberculosis in August 1884 aged only
twenty-three, their two children, Alois and Angela, were still tiny.

During her illness, Fanni had been moved to the fresh air of the
countryside outside Braunau. For someone to look after his two
young children, Alois turned straight away to Klara Polzl, and
brought her back to Braunau. With Fanni scarcely in her grave,
Klara became pregnant. Since they were officially second cousins, a
marriage between Alois and Klara needed the dispensation of the
Church. After a wait of four months, in which Klara’s condition
became all the more evident, the dispensation finally arrived from
Rome in late 1884, and the couple were married on 7 January 1885.
The wedding ceremony took place at six o’clock in the morning.
Soon after a perfunctory celebration, Alois was back at his work at
the customs post.

The first of the children of Alois’s third marriage, Gustav, was
born in May 1885, to be followed in September the following year
by a second child, Ida, and, with scarcely a respite, by another son,
Otto, who died only days after his birth. Further tragedy for Klara
came soon afterwards, as both Gustav and Ida contracted diphtheria
and died within weeks of each other in December 1887 and January
1888. By the summer of 1888 Klara was pregnant again. At half-past
six in the evening on 20 April 1889, an overcast and chilly Easter
Saturday, she gave birth in her home in the ‘Gasthof zum Pommer’,
Vorstadt Nr.219, to her fourth child, the first to survive infancy: this
was Adolf.

The historical record of Adolf ’s early years is very sparse. His
own account in Mein Kampf is inaccurate in detail and coloured in
interpretation. Post-war recollections of family and acquaintances
have to be treated with care, and are at times as dubious as the
attempts during the Third Reich itself to glorify the childhood of the
future Fuhrer. For the formative period so important to
psychologists and ‘psycho-historians’, the fact has to be faced that
there is little to go on which is not retrospective guesswork.

By the time of Adolf ’s birth, Alois was a man of moderate means.
His income was a solid one — rather more than that of an
elementary school headmaster. In addition to Alois, Klara, the two
children of Alois’s second marriage, Alois Jr (before he left home in

1896) and Angela, Adolf, and his younger brother Edmund (born in
1894, but died in 1900) and sister Paula (born in 1896), the
household also ran to a cook and maid, Rosalia Schichtl. In addition,
there was Adolf ’s aunt Johanna, one of his mother’s younger
sisters, a bad-tempered, hunchbacked woman who was, however,
fond of Adolf and a good help for Klara around the house. In
material terms, then, the Hitler family led a comfortable middle-
class existence.

Family life was, however, less than harmonious and happy. Alois
was an archetypal provincial civil servant — pompous, status-proud,
strict, humourless, frugal, pedantically punctual, and devoted to
duty. He was regarded with respect by the local community. But he
had a bad temper which could flare up quite unpredictably. At
home, Alois was an authoritarian, overbearing, domineering
husband and a stern, distant, masterful, and often irritable father.
For long after their marriage, Klara could not get out of the habit of
calling him ‘Uncle’. And even after his death, she kept a rack of his
pipes in the kitchen and would point to them on occasion when he
was referred to, as if to invoke his authority.

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What affection the young children missed in their father was more
than recompensed by their mother. According to the description
given much later by her Jewish doctor, Eduard Bloch, after his own
forced emigration from Nazi Germany, Klara Hitler was ‘a simple,
modest, kindly woman. She was tall, had brownish hair which she
kept neatly plaited, and a long, oval face with beautifully expressive

grey-blue eyes.’ In personality, she was submissive, retiring, quiet, a

pious churchgoer, taken up in the running of the household, and
above all absorbed in the care of her children and stepchildren. The
deaths within weeks of each other of her first three children in
infancy in 1887-8, and the subsequent death of her fifth child,
Edmund, under the age of six in 1900, must have been hammer
blows for her. Her sorrows can only have been compounded by
living with an irascible, unfeeling, overbearing husband. It is
scarcely surprising that she made an impression of a saddened,
careworn woman. Nor is it any wonder that she bestowed a
smothering, protective love and devotion on her two surviving
children, Adolf and Paula. Klara was in turn held in love and
affection by her children and stepchildren, by Adolf quite especially.
‘Outwardly, his love for his mother was his most striking feature,’
Dr Bloch later wrote. ‘While he was not a “mother’s boy” in the
usual sense,’ he added, ‘I have never witnessed a closer attachment.’
In one of the few signs of human affection recorded in Mein Kampf,
Adolf wrote, ‘I had honoured my father, but loved my mother.’ He
carried her picture with him down to the last days in the bunker.
Her portrait stood in his rooms in Munich, Berlin, and at the
Obersalzberg (his alpine residence near Berchtesgaden). His mother
may well, in fact, have been the only person he genuinely loved in

his entire life.

Adolf ’s early years were spent, then, under the suffocating shield of
an over-anxious mother in a household dominated by the

threatening presence of a disciplinarian father, against whose wrath

the submissive Klara was helpless to protect her offspring. Adolf ’s
younger sister, Paula, spoke after the war of her mother as ‘a very
soft and tender person, the compensatory element between the
almost too harsh father and the very lively children who were
perhaps somewhat difficult to train. If there were ever quarrel[s] or
differences of opinion between my parents,’ she continued, ‘it was
always on account of the children. It was especially my brother
Adolf who challenged my father to extreme harshness and who got
his sound thrashing every day ... How often on the other hand did
my mother caress him and try to obtain with her kindness what the
father could not succeed [in obtaining] with harshness!’ Hitler
himself, during his late-night fireside monologues in the 1940s,
often recounted that his father had sudden bursts of temper and
would then immediately hit out. He did not love his father, he said,
but instead feared him all the more. His poor beloved mother, he
used to remark, to whom he was so attached, lived in constant
concern about the beatings he had to take, sometimes waiting

outside the door as he was thrashed.

Quite possibly, Alois’s violence was also turned against his wife. A
passage in Mein Kampf, in which Hitler ostensibly describes the
conditions in a workers’ family where the children have to witness
drunken beatings of their mother by their father, may well have
drawn in part on his own childhood experiences. What the legacy of

all this was for the way Adolf’s character developed must remain a

matter for speculation. That its impact was profound is hard to
doubt.

Beneath the surface, the later Hitler was unquestionably being
formed. Speculation though it must remain, it takes little to imagine
that his later patronizing contempt for the submissiveness of
women, the thirst for dominance (and imagery of the Leader as
stern, authoritarian father-figure), the inability to form deep
personal relationships, the corresponding cold brutality towards
humankind, and — not least — the capacity for hatred so profound
that it must have reflected an immeasurable undercurrent of self-
hatred concealed in the extreme narcissism that was its counterpoint
must surely have had roots in the subliminal influences of the young
Adolf ’s family circumstances. But assumptions have to remain
guesswork. The outer traces of Adolf ’s early life, so far as they can
be reconstructed, bear no hint of what would emerge. Attempts to
find in the youngster ‘the warped person within the murderous
dictator’ have proved unpersuasive. If we exclude our knowledge of
what was to come, his family circumstances invoke for the most

part sympathy for the child exposed to them.

Alois Hitler had always been a restless soul. The Hitlers had moved
house several times within Braunau, and had subsequently been
uprooted on a number of occasions. In November 1898, a final
move for Alois took place when he bought a house with a small plot
of attached land in Leonding, a village on the outskirts of Linz.

From now on, the family settled in the Linz area, and Adolf — down
to his days in the bunker in 1945 - looked upon Linz as his home
town. Linz reminded him of the happy, carefree days of his youth. It
held associations with his mother. And it was the most ‘German’
town of the Austrian Empire. It evidently symbolized for him the
provincial small-town Germanic idyll — the image he would
throughout his life set against the city he would soon come to
know, and detest: Vienna.

Adolf was now in his third elementary school. He seems to have
established himself rapidly with a new set of schoolmates, and
became ‘a little ringleader’ in the games of cops and robbers which
the village boys played in the woods and fields around their homes.
War games were a particular favourite. Adolf himself was thrilled
by an illustrated history of the Franco-Prussian War, which he had
come across at home. And once the Boer War broke out, the games
revolved around the heroic exploits of the Boers, whom the village
boys fervently supported. About this same time, Adolf became
gripped by the adventure stories of Karl May, whose popular tales
of the Wild West and Indian wars (though May had never been to
America) enthralled thousands of youngsters. Most of these
youngsters graduated from the Karl May adventures and the
childhood fantasies they fostered as they grew up. For Adolf,
however, the fascination with Karl May never faded. As Reich
Chancellor, he still read the May stories, recommending them, too,
to his generals, whom he accused of lacking imagination.

Adolf later referred to ‘this happy time’, when ‘school work was
ridiculously easy, leaving me so much free time that the sun saw
more of me than my room’, when ‘meadows and woods were then
the battleground on which the ever-present “antagonisms” ’ — the
growing conflict with his father — ‘came to a head’.

In 1900, however, the carefree days were drawing to a close. And
just around the time when important decisions had to be made
about Adolf ’s future, and the secondary education path he should
follow, the Hitler family was once more plunged into distress with
the death, through measles, of Adolf ’s little brother Edmund on 2

February 1900. With Alois’s elder son, Alois Jr, already spiting his
father and living away from home, any careerist ambitions for his
offspring now rested upon Adolf. They were to lead to tension
between father and son in the remaining years of Alois’s life.

Adolf began his secondary schooling on 17 September 1900. His
father had opted for the Realschule rather than the Gymnasium, that
is, for a school which attached less weight to the traditional classical
and humanistic studies but was still seen as a preparation for higher
education, with an emphasis upon more ‘modern’ subjects, including
science and technical studies. According to Adolf, his father was
influenced by the aptitude his son already showed for drawing,
together with a disdain for the impracticality of humanistic studies
deriving from his own hard way to career advancement. It was not
the typical route for a would-be civil servant — the career which
Alois had in mind for his son. But, then, Alois himself had made a
good career in the service of the Austrian state with hardly any
formal education at all to speak of.

The transition to secondary school was a hard one for young
Adolf. He had to trek every day from his home in Leonding to
school in Linz, a journey of over an hour each way, leaving him
little or no time for developing out-of-school friendships. While he
was still a big fish in a little pond among the village boys in
Leonding, his classmates in his new school took no special notice of
him. He had no close friends at school; nor did he seek any. And the
attention he had received from his village teacher was now replaced
by the more impersonal treatment of a number of teachers
responsible for individual subjects. The minimum effort with which
Adolf had mastered the demands of the primary school now no
longer sufficed. His school work, which had been so good in
primary school, suffered from the outset. And his behaviour
betrayed clear signs of immaturity. Adolf’s school record, down to
the time he left in autumn 1905, hovered between poor and
mediocre.

In a letter to Hitler’s defence counsel on 12 December 1923,
following the failed putsch attempt in Munich, his former class

teacher, Dr Eduard Huemer, recalled Adolf as a thin, pale youth
commuting between Linz and Leonding, a boy not making full use
of his talent, lacking in application, and unable to accommodate
himself to school discipline. He characterized him as stubborn, high-
handed, dogmatic, and hot-tempered. Strictures from his teachers
were received with a scarcely concealed insolence. With his
classmates he was domineering, and a leading figure in the sort of
immature pranks which Huemer attributed to too great an addiction
to Karl May’s Indian stories together with a tendency to waste time
furthered by the daily trip from Leonding and back.

There can be little doubting that Hitler’s attitude towards his
school and teachers (with one exception) was scathingly negative.
He left school ‘with an elemental hatred’ towards it, and later
mocked and derided his schooling and teachers. Only his history
teacher, Dr Leopold Potsch, was singled out for praise in Mein
Kampf for firing Hitler’s interest through vivid narratives and tales
of heroism from the German past, stirring in him the strongly
emotional German-nationalist, anti-Habsburg feelings (which were
in any case widely prevalent in his school, as in Linz generally).

The problems of adjustment that Adolf encountered in the
Realschule in Linz were compounded by the deterioration in
relations with his father and the running sore of the disputes over
the boy’s future career. For Alois, the virtues of a civil service
career could not be gainsaid. But all his attempts to enthuse his son
met with adamant rejection. ‘I yawned and grew sick to my
stomach at the thought of sitting in an office, deprived of my
liberty; ceasing to be master of my own time,’ wrote Adolf in Mein
Kampf.

The more Adolf resisted the idea, the more authoritarian and
insistent his father became. Equally stubborn, when asked what he
envisaged for his future, Adolf claimed he replied that he wanted to
be an artist — a vision which for the dour Austrian civil servant Alois
was quite unthinkable. ‘Artist, no, never as long as I live!’, Hitler
has him saying. Whether the young Adolf, allegedly at the age of
twelve, so plainly stipulated he wanted to be an artist may be

doubted. But that there was a conflict with his father arising from
his unwillingness to follow a career in the civil service, and that his
father found fault with his son’s indolent and purposeless existence,
in which drawing appeared to be his main interest, seems certain.
Alois had worked his way up through industry, diligence, and effort
from humble origins to a position of dignity and respect in the state
service. His son, from a more privileged background, saw fit to do
no more than dawdle away his time drawing and dreaming, would
not apply himself in school, had no career path in view, and scorned
the type of career which had meant everything to his father. The
dispute amounted, therefore, to more than a rejection of a civil
service career. It was a rejection of everything his father had stood
for; and with that, a rejection of his father himself.

Adolf’s adolescence, as he commented in Mein Kampf, was ‘very
painful’. With the move to the school in Linz, and the start of the
rumbling conflict with his father, an important formative phase in
his character development had begun. The happy, playful youngster
of the primary school days had grown into an idle, resentful,
rebellious, sullen, stubborn, and purposeless teenager.

When, on 3 January 1903, his father collapsed and died over his
usual morning glass of wine in the Gasthaus Wiesinger, the conflict
of will over Adolf ’s future was over. Alois had left his family in
comfortable circumstances. And whatever emotional adjustments
were needed for his widow, Klara, it is unlikely that Adolf, now the
only ‘man about the house’, grieved over his father. With his
father’s death, much of the parental pressure was removed. His
mother did her best to persuade Adolf to comply with his father’s
wishes. But she shied away from conflict and, however concerned
she was about his future, was far too ready to give in to Adolf ’s
whims. In any case, his continued poor school performance in itself
ruled out any realistic expectation that he would be qualified for a
career in the civil service.

His school record in the following two years remained mediocre.
In autumn 1905, at the age of sixteen, he used illness — feigned, or
most likely genuine but exaggerated — to persuade his mother that

he was not fit to continue school and gladly put his schooling
behind him for good with no clear future career path mapped out.

The time between leaving school in autumn 1905 and his
mother’s death at the end of 1907 is passed over almost completely
in Mein Kampf. In these two years, Adolf lived a life of parasitic
idleness — funded, provided for, looked after, and cosseted by a
doting mother, with his own room in the comfortable flat in the
Humboldtstrafge in Linz, which the family had moved into in June
1905. His mother, his aunt Johanna, and his little sister Paula were
there to look after all his needs, to wash, clean, and cook for him.
His mother even bought him a grand piano, on which he had lessons
for four months between October 1906 and January 1907. He spent
his time during the days drawing, painting, reading, or writing
‘poetry’; the evenings were for going to the theatre or opera; and
the whole time he daydreamed and fantasized about his future as a
great artist. He stayed up late into the night and slept long into the
mornings. He had no clear aim in view. The indolent lifestyle, the
grandiosity of fantasy, the lack of discipline for systematic work —
all features of the later Hitler - can be seen in these two years in
Linz. It was little wonder that Hitler came to refer to this period as
‘the happiest days which seemed to me almost like a beautiful
dream’.

A description of Adolf ’s carefree life in Linz between 1905 and
1907 is provided by the one friend he had at that time, August
Kubizek, the son of a Linz upholsterer with dreams of his own about
becoming a great musician. Kubizek’s post-war memoirs need to be
treated with care, both in factual detail and in interpretation. They
are a lengthened and embellished version of recollections he had
originally been commissioned by the Nazi Party to compile. Even
retrospectively, the admiration in which Kubizek continued to hold
his former friend coloured his judgement. But more than that,
Kubizek plainly invented a great deal, built some passages around
Hitler’s own account in Mein Kampf, and deployed some near
plagiarism to amplify his own limited memory. However, for all
their weaknesses, his recollections have been shown to be a more

credible source on Hitler’s youth than was once thought, in
particular where they touch upon experiences related to Kubizek’s
own interests in music and theatre. There can be no doubt that,
whatever their deficiencies, they do contain important reflections of
the young Hitler’s personality, showing features in embryo which
were to be all too prominent in later years.

August Kubizek — ‘Gustl’ - was some nine months older than
Adolf. They met by chance in autumn 1905 (not 1904, as Kubizek
claimed) at the opera in Linz. Adolf had for some years been a
fanatical admirer of Wagner, and his love of opera, especially the
works of the ‘master of Bayreuth’, was shared by Kubizek. Gustl
was highly impressionable; Adolf out for someone to impress. Gustl
was compliant, weak-willed, subordinate; Adolf was superior,
determining, dominant. Gustl felt strongly about little or nothing;
Adolf had strong feelings about everything. ‘He had to speak,’
recalled Kubizek, ‘and needed someone to listen to him.’ For his
part, Gustl, from his artisanal background, having attended a lower
school than the young Hitler, and feeling himself therefore both
socially and educationally inferior, was filled with admiration at
Adolf ’s power of expression. Whether Adolf was haranguing him
about the deficiencies of civil servants, school teachers, local
taxation, social welfare lotteries, opera performances, or Linz public
buildings, Gustl was gripped as never before. Not just what his
friend had to say, but how he said it, was what he found attractive.
Gustl, in self-depiction a quiet, dreamy youth, had found an ideal
foil in the opinionated, cocksure, ‘know-all’ Hitler. It was a perfect
partnership.

In the evenings they would go off, dressed in their fineries, to the
theatre or the opera, the pale and weedy young Hitler, sporting the
beginnings of a thin moustache, looking distinctly foppish in his
black coat and dark hat, the image completed by a black cane with
an ivory handle. After the performance, Adolf would invariably hold
forth, heatedly critical of the production, or effusively rapturous.
Even though Kubizek was musically more gifted and knowledgeable

than Hitler, he remained the passive and submissive partner in the
‘discussions’.

Hitler’s passion for Wagner knew no bounds. A performance
could affect him almost like a religious experience, plunging him
into deep and mystical fantasies. Wagner amounted for him to the
supreme artistic genius, the model to be emulated. Adolf was
carried away by Wagner’s powerful musical dramas, his evocation
of a heroic, distant, and sublimely mystical Germanic past.
Lohengrin, the saga of the mysterious knight of the grail, epitome of
the Teutonic hero, sent from the castle of Monsalvat by his father
Parzival to rescue the wrongly condemned pure maiden, Elsa, but
ultimately betrayed by her, had been his first Wagner opera, and
remained his favourite.

Even more than music, the theme, when Adolf and Gustl were
together, was great art and architecture. More precisely, it was
Adolf as the future great artistic genius. The young, dandified Hitler
scorned the notion of working to earn one’s daily bread. He
enraptured the impressionable Kubizek with his visions of himself as
a great artist, and Kubizek as a foremost musician. While Kubizek
toiled in his father’s workshop, Adolf filled his time with drawing
and dreaming. He would then meet Gustl after work, and, as the
friends wandered through Linz in the evenings, would lecture him
on the need to tear down, remodel, and replace the central public
buildings, showing his friend countless sketches of his rebuilding
plans.

The make-believe world also included Adolf’s infatuation with a
girl who did not even know of his existence. Stefanie, an elegant
young lady in Linz to be seen promenading through the town on the
arm of her mother, and occasionally greeted by an admirer among
the young officers, was for Hitler an ideal to be admired from a
distance, not approached in person, a fantasy figure who would be
waiting for the great artist when the right moment for their
marriage arrived, after which they would live in the magnificent
villa that he would design for her.

Another glimpse into the fantasy world is afforded by Adolf ’s
plans for the future when, around 1906, the friends bought a lottery
ticket together. Adolf was so certain they would win first prize that
he designed an elaborate vision of their future residence. The two
young men would live an artistic existence, tended by a middle-
aged lady who could meet their artistic requirements — neither
Stefanie nor any other woman of their own age figured in this
vision — and would go off to Bayreuth and Vienna and make other
visits of cultural value. So certain was Adolf that they would win,
that his fury at the state lottery knew no bounds when nothing
came of their little flutter.

In spring 1906, Adolf persuaded his mother to fund him on a first
trip to Vienna, allegedly to study the picture gallery in the Court
Museum, more likely to fulfil a growing ambition to visit the
cultural sites of the Imperial capital. For two weeks, perhaps longer,
he wandered through Vienna as a tourist taking in the city’s many
attractions. With whom he stayed is unknown. The four postcards
he sent his friend Gustl and his comments in Mein Kampf show how
captivated he was by the grandeur of the buildings and the layout of
the Ringstraf$e. Otherwise, he seems to have spent his time in the
theatre and marvelling at the Court Opera, where Gustav Mahler’s
productions of Wagner’s Tristan and The Flying Dutchman left those
of provincial Linz in the shade. Nothing had changed on his return
home. But the sojourn in Vienna furthered the idea, probably
already growing in his mind, that he would develop his artistic
career at the Viennese Academy of Fine Arts.

By the summer of 1907, this idea had taken more concrete shape.
Adolf was now aged eighteen but still never having earned a day’s
income and continuing his drone’s life without career prospects.
Despite the advice of relatives that it was about time he found a
job, he had persuaded his mother to let him return to Vienna, this
time with the intention of entering the Academy. Whatever her
reservations, the prospect of a systematic study at the Academy in
Vienna must have seemed to her an improvement on his aimless
existence in Linz. And she did not need to worry about her son’s

material welfare. Adolf ’s ‘Hanitante’ - Aunt Johanna — had come up
with a loan of 924 Kronen to fund her nephew’s artistic studies. It
gave him something like a year’s salary for a young lawyer or
teacher.

By this stage, his mother was seriously ill with breast cancer. She
had already been operated on in January, and in the spring and
early summer was frequently treated by the Jewish family doctor,
Dr Bloch. Frau Klara — now in the new family home at Urfahr, a
suburb of Linz — must have been seriously worried not only about
the mounting medical costs, but about her eleven-year-old daughter
Paula, still at home and looked after by Aunt Johanna, and about
her darling boy Adolf, still without a clear future. Adolf, described
by Dr Bloch as a tall, sallow, frail-looking boy who ‘lived within
himself’, was certainly worried about his mother. He settled the bill
of 100 Kronen for her twenty-day stay in hospital at the start of the
year. He wept when Dr Bloch had to tell him and his sister the bad
news that their mother had little chance of surviving her cancer. He
tended to her during her illness and was anguished at the intense
pain she suffered. He had, it seems, to take responsibility for
whatever decisions had to be made about her care. Despite his
mother’s deteriorating condition, however, Adolf went ahead with
his plans to move to Vienna. He left for the capital in early
September 1907, in time to take the entrance examination for the
Academy of Fine Arts.

Admission to the examination itself was decided on the basis of
an entry test resting on assessment of pieces of work presented by
the candidates. Adolf had, he later wrote, left home ‘armed with a
thick pile of drawings’. He was one of 113 candidates and was
allowed to proceed to the examination itself. Thirty-three
candidates were excluded following this initial test. At the
beginning of October, he sat the two tough three-hour examinations
in which the candidates had to produce drawings on specified
themes. Only twenty-eight candidates succeeded. Hitler was not
among them. ‘Test drawing unsatisfactory. Few heads,’ was the
verdict.

It apparently never occurred to the supremely self-confident
Adolf that he might fail the entrance examination for the Academy.
He had been, he wrote in Mein Kampf, ‘convinced that it would be
child’s play to pass the examination ... I was so convinced that I
would be successful that when I received my rejection, it struck me
as a bolt from the blue.’ He sought an explanation, and was told by
the Rector of the Academy that there was no doubt about his
unsuitability for the school of painting, but that his talents plainly
lay in architecture. Hitler left the interview, as he put it, ‘for the
first time in my young life at odds with myself’. After a few days
pondering his fate, he concluded, so he wrote, that the Rector’s
judgement was right, and ‘that I should some day become an
architect’ — not that he then or later did anything to remedy the
educational deficiencies which provided a major obstacle to
studying for a career in architecture. In reality, Adolf probably did
not bounce back anything like so quickly as his own story suggests,
and the fact that he reapplied the following year for admission to
the painting school casts some doubt on the version of a lightning
recognition that his future was as an architect. At any rate, the
rejection by the Academy was such a body blow to his pride that he
kept it a secret. He avoided telling either his friend Gustl, or his
mother, of his failure.

Meanwhile, Klara Hitler lay dying. The sharp deterioration in her
condition brought Adolf back from Vienna to be told by Dr Bloch,
towards the end of October, that his mother’s condition was
hopeless. Deeply affected by the news, Adolf was more than dutiful.
Both his sister, Paula, and Dr Bloch later testified to his devoted and
‘indefatigable’ care for his dying mother. But despite Dr Bloch’s
close medical attention, Klara’s health worsened rapidly during the
autumn. On 21 December 1907, aged forty-seven, she passed away
quietly. Though he had witnessed many deathbed scenes, recalled
Dr Bloch, ‘I have never seen anyone so prostrate with grief as Adolf
Hitler.’ His mother’s death was ‘a dreadful blow’, Hitler wrote in
Mein Kampf, ‘particularly for me’. He felt alone and bereft at her

passing. He had lost the one person for whom he had ever felt close
affection and warmth.

‘Poverty and hard reality,’ Hitler later claimed, ‘now compelled
me to take a quick decision. What little my father had left had been
largely exhausted by my mother’s grave illness; the orphan’s
pension to which I was entitled was not enough for me even to live
on, and so I was faced with the problem of somehow making my
own living.’ When, he continued, after her death he returned to
Vienna for the third time, now to stay for some years, his old
defiance and determination had come back to him, and his goal was
now clear: ‘I wanted to become an architect and obstacles do not
exist to be surrendered to, but only to be broken.’ He claimed he set
out to overcome the obstacles, inspired by the example of his
father’s rise through his own efforts from poverty to the position of
a government official.

In reality, his mother’s careful housekeeping — aided by not
insignificant contributions from her sister Johanna — had left more
than sufficient to pay for the considerable medical costs, as well as a
relatively expensive funeral. Nor was Adolf left nearly penniless.
There was no question of immediately having to earn his own
living. Certainly, the monthly orphans’ pension of 25 Kronen which
he and his younger sister Paula — now brought up by their half-sister
Angela and her husband Leo Raubal — received could scarcely
provide for his upkeep in inflation-ridden Austria. And apart from
interest, Adolf and Paula could not touch the inheritance from their
father until their twenty-fourth year. But what his mother had left -
perhaps in the region of 2,000 Kronen once the funeral expenses
had been covered — was divided between the two orphaned minors.
Adolf’s share, together with his orphan’s pension, was enough to
provide for his upkeep in Vienna for a year without work. And on
top of that, he still had the residue of his aunt’s generous loan. He
scarcely had the financial security which has sometimes been
attributed to him. But, all in all, his financial position was, during
this time, substantially better than that of most genuine students in
Vienna.

Moreover, Adolf was in less of a hurry to leave Linz than he
implies in Mein Kampf. Though his sister almost forty years later
stated that he moved to Vienna within a few days of their mother’s
death, Adolf was still recorded as in Urfahr in mid-January and mid-
February 1908. Unless, as seems unlikely, he made brief visits to
Vienna between these dates, it looks as if he stayed in Urfahr for at
least seven weeks after the death of his mother. The family
household account-book indicates that the break with Linz was not
made before May.

When he did return to Vienna, in February 1908, it was not to
pursue with all vigour the necessary course of action to become an
architect, but to slide back into the life of indolence, idleness, and
self-indulgence which he had followed before his mother’s death. He
even now persuaded Kubizek’s parents to let August leave his work
in the family upholstery business to join him in Vienna in order to
study music.

His failure to enter the Academy and his mother’s death, both
occurring within less than four months in late 1907, amounted to a
crushing double-blow for the young Hitler. He had been abruptly
jolted from his dream of an effortless path to the fame of a great
artist; and the sole person upon whom he depended emotionally had
been lost to him at almost the same time. His artistic fantasy
remained. Any alternative — such as settling down to a steady job in
Linz — was plainly an abhorrent thought. A neighbour in Urfahr, the
widow of the local postmaster, later recalled: ‘When the postmaster
asked him one day what he wanted to do for a living and whether
he wouldn’t like to join the post office, he replied that it was his
intention to become a great artist. When he was reminded that he
lacked the necessary funding and personal connections, he replied
tersely: “Makart and Rubens worked themselves up from poor
backgrounds.” ’ How he might emulate them was entirely unclear.
His only hope rested upon retaking the entrance examination for the
Academy the following year. He must have known his chances were
not high. But he did nothing to enhance them. Meanwhile, he had to
get by in Vienna.

Despite the drastic alteration in his prospects and circumstances,
Adolf’s lifestyle — the drifting existence in an egoistic fantasy-world
— remained unchanged. But the move from the cosy provincialism of
Linz to the political and social melting-pot of Vienna nevertheless
marked a crucial transition. The experiences in the Austrian capital
were to leave an indelible mark on the young Hitler and to shape
decisively the formation of his prejudices and phobias.

2
Drop-out

The city where Hitler was to live for the next five years was an
extraordinary place. More than any other European metropolis,
Vienna epitomized tensions — social, cultural, political — that
signalled the turn of an era, the death of the nineteenth-century
world. They were to mould the young Hitler.

Anticipating that he would be studying at the Academy of Fine
Arts, he had in late September or the beginning of October 1907
rented a small room on the second floor of a house in Stumpergasse
31, near the Westbahnhof in Vienna, owned by a Czech woman,
Frau Zakreys. This is where he returned, some time between 14 and
17 February 1908, to pick up where he had left off before his
mother’s death.

He was not long alone. We can recall that he had persuaded
August Kubizek’s parents to let their son join him in Vienna to carry
out his studies to become a musician. Kubizek’s father had been
most reluctant to let his son go off with someone he regarded as no
more than a failure at school and who thought himself above
learning a proper trade. But Adolf had prevailed. On 18 February,
he sent a postcard to his friend, urging him to come as quickly as
possible. ‘Dear Friend,’ he wrote, ‘am anxiously expecting news of
your arrival. Write soon so that I can prepare everything for your
festive welcome. The whole of Vienna is awaiting you.’ A postscript
added: ‘Beg you again, come soon.’ Four days later, Gustl’s tearful
parents bade him goodbye, and he left to join his friend in Vienna.
Adolf met a tired Kubizek at the station that evening, took him back
to Stumpergasse to stay the first night, but, typically, insisted on

immediately showing him all the sights of Vienna. How could
someone come to Vienna and go to bed without first seeing the
Court Opera House? So Gustl was dragged off to view the opera
building, St Stephen’s cathedral (which could scarcely be seen
through the mist), and the lovely church of St Maria am Gestade. It
was after midnight when they returned to Stumpergasse, and later
still when an exhausted Kubizek fell asleep with Hitler still
haranguing him about the grandeur of Vienna.

The next few months were to be a repeat, on a grander scale, of
the lifestyle of the two youths in Linz. An early search for lodgings
for Gustl was rapidly given up, and Frau Zakreys persuaded to swap
her larger room and move into the cramped little room that Hitler
had occupied. Adolf and his friend now occupied the same room,
paying double the rent (10 Kronen each) that Hitler had paid for his
earlier room. Within the next few days, Kubizek learnt that he had
passed the entrance examination and been accepted for study at the
Vienna Conservatoire. He rented a grand piano which took up most
of the available space in the room, just allowing Hitler the three
paces to do his usual stomping backwards and forwards. Apart from
the piano, the room was furnished with simple necessities: two
beds, a commode, a wardrobe, a washstand, a table, and two chairs.

Kubizek settled down into a regular pattern of music study. What
Hitler was up to was less clear to his friend. He stayed in bed in the
mornings, was missing when Kubizek came back from the
Conservatoire at lunchtimes, hung around the grounds of
Schonbrunn Palace on fine afternoons, pored over books, fantasized
over grandiose architectural and writing plans, and spent a good
deal of time drawing until late into the night. Gustl’s puzzlement
about how his friend could combine so much leisure time with
studying at the Academy of Fine Arts was ended only after some
considerable time. A show of irritation about Kubizek practising his
piano scales led to a full-scale row between the two friends about
study timetables and ended in Hitler finally admitting in fury that
he had been rejected by the Academy. When Gustl asked him what,
then, he was going to do, Hitler rounded on him: ‘What now, what

now? ... Are you starting too: what now?’ The truth was, Hitler had
no idea where he was going or what he would do. He was drifting
aimlessly.

Kubizek had plainly touched a raw nerve. Adolf had for
mercenary reasons not told his family about his failure to enter the
Academy. Otherwise, his guardian back in Linz, Josef Mayrhofer,
would probably have denied him the 25 Kronen a month he
received as his share of the orphans’ pension. And he would have
come under even more pressure to find a job. But why did he
deceive his friend? For a teenager to fail to pass an extremely tough
entrance examination is in itself neither unusual nor shameful. But
Adolf evidently could not bear to tell his friend, to whom he had
always claimed to be so superior in all matters of artistic
judgement, and whose own studies at the Conservatoire had started
so promisingly, of his rejection. The blow to his self-esteem had
been profound. And the bitterness showed. According to Kubizek, he
would fly off the handle at the slightest thing. His loss of self-
confidence could flare up in an instant into boundless anger and
violent denunciation of all who he thought were persecuting him.
The tirades of hate directed at everything and everybody were
those of an outsized ego desperately wanting acceptance and unable
to come to terms with his personal insignificance, with failure and
mediocrity.

Adolf had still not given up hope of entering the Academy. But,
typically, he took no steps to ensure that his chances would be
better a second time round. Systematic preparation and hard work
were as foreign to the young Hitler as they would be to the later
dictator. Instead, his time was largely spent in dilettante fashion, as
it had been in Linz, devising grandiose schemes shared only with
the willing Kubizek — fantasy plans that usually arose from sudden
whims and bright ideas and were dropped almost as soon as they
had begun.

Apart from architecture, Hitler’s main passion, as it had been in
Linz, was music. Particular favourites, certainly in later years, were
Beethoven, Bruckner, Liszt, and Brahms. He greatly enjoyed, too,

the operettas of Johann Straufg and Franz Lehar. Wagner was, of
course, the non plus ultra. Adolf and Gustl were at the opera most
nights, paying their 2 Kronen to gain the standing place that they
had often queued for hours to obtain. They saw operas by Mozart,
Beethoven, and the Italian masters Donizetti, Rossini, and Bellini as
well as the main works of Verdi and Puccini. But for Hitler only
German music counted. He could not join in the enthusiasm for
Verdi or Puccini operas, playing to packed houses in Vienna. Adolf’s
passion for Wagner, as in Linz, knew no bounds. Now he and his
friend were able to see all Wagner’s operas performed at one of the
best opera houses in Europe. In the short time they were together,
Kubizek reckoned they saw Lohengrin ten times. ‘For him,’ remarked
Kubizek, ‘a second-rate Wagner was a hundred times better than a
first-class Verdi.’ Kubizek was of a different mind; but to no avail.
Adolf would not rest until his friend agreed to forget about going to
see Verdi at the Court Opera and accompany him to a Wagner
performance at the less highbrow Popular Opera House. ‘When it
was a matter of a Wagner performance, Adolf would stand no
contradiction.’

‘When I hear Wagner,’ Hitler himself much later recounted, ‘it
seems to me that I hear rhythms of a bygone world.’ It was a world
of Germanic myth, of great drama and wondrous spectacle, of gods
and heroes, of titanic struggle and redemption, of victory and of
death. It was a world where the heroes were outsiders who
challenged the old order, like Rienzi, Tannhauser, Stolzing, and
Siegfried; or chaste saviours like Lohengrin and Parsifal. Betrayal,
sacrifice, redemption, and heroic death were Wagnerian themes
which would also preoccupy Hitler down to the Gotterdammerung of
his regime in 1945. And it was a world created with grandiose
vision by an artist of genius, an outsider and revolutionary, all-or-
nothing refuser of compromise, challenger of the existing order,
dismissive of the need to bow to the bourgeois ethic of working for
a living, surmounting rejection and persecution, overcoming
adversity to attain greatness. It was little wonder that the fantasist
and drop-out, the rejected and unrecognized artistic genius in the

dingy room in the Stumpergasse, could find his idol in the master of
Bayreuth. Hitler, the nonentity, the mediocrity, the failure, wanted
to live like a Wagnerian hero. He wanted to become himself a new
Wagner -— the philosopher-king, the genius, the supreme artist. In
Hitler’s mounting identity crisis following his rejection at the
Academy of Arts, Wagner was for Hitler the artistic giant he had
dreamed of becoming but knew he could never emulate, the
incarnation of the triumph of aesthetics and the supremacy of art.

The strange coexistence of the young Hitler and Kubizek continued
into midsummer 1908. During those months, almost the only other
person apart from his friend with whom Hitler had regular contact
was his landlady, Frau Zakreys. Nor did Kubizek and Hitler have
any joint acquaintances. Adolf regarded his friendship with Gustl as
exclusive, allowing him no other friendships. When Gustl brought a
young woman, one of a small number of his music pupils, back to
his room, Hitler, thinking she was a girlfriend, was beside himself
with rage. Kubizek’s explanation that it was simply a matter of
coaching a pupil in musical harmony merely provoked a tirade
about the pointlessness of women studying. In Kubizek’s view,
Hitler was outrightly misogynist. He pointed out Hitler’s
satisfaction that women were not permitted in the stalls of the
opera. Apart from his distant admiration for Stefanie in Linz,
Kubizek knew of Hitler having no relations with any woman during
the years of their acquaintance in both Linz and Vienna. This would
not alter during his remaining years in the Austrian capital. None of
the accounts of Hitler’s time in the Men’s Home gives a hint of any
women in his life. When his circle of acquaintances got round to
discussing women — and, doubtless, their own former girlfriends and
sexual experiences — the best Hitler could come up with was a
veiled reference to Stefanie, who had been his ‘first love’, though
‘she never knew it, because he never told her’. The impression left
with Reinhold Hanisch, an acquaintance from that time, was that

‘Hitler had very little respect for the female sex, but very austere
ideas about relations between men and women. He often said that,
if men only wanted to, they could adopt a strictly moral way of
living.’ This was entirely in line with the moral code preached by
the Austrian pan-German movement associated with Georg Ritter
von Schonerer, whose radical brand of German nationalism and
racial antisemitism Hitler had admired since his Linz days. Celibacy
until the twenty-fifth year, the code advocated, was healthy,
advantageous to strength of will, and the basis of physical or mental
high achievement. The cultivation of corresponding dietary habits
was advised. Eating meat and drinking alcohol - seen as stimulants
to sexual activity — were to be avoided. And upholding the strength
and purity of the Germanic race meant keeping free of the moral
decadence and danger of infection which accompanied consorting
with prostitutes, who should be left to clients of ‘inferior’ races.
Here was ideological justification enough for Hitler’s chaste lifestyle
and prudish morals. But, in any case, certainly in the time in Vienna
after he parted company with Kubizek, Hitler was no ‘catch’ for
women.

Probably, he was frightened of women - certainly of their
sexuality. Hitler later described his own ideal woman as ‘a cute,
cuddly, naive little thing - tender, sweet, and stupid’. His assertion
that a woman ‘would rather bow to a strong man than dominate a
weakling’ may well have been a compensatory projection of his
own sexual complexes.

Kubizek was adamant that Hitler was sexually normal (though on
the basis of his own account it is difficult to see how he was in a
position to judge). This was also the view of doctors who at a much
later date thoroughly examined him. Biologically, it may well have
been so. Claims that sexual deviance arising from the absence of a
testicle were the root of Hitler’s personality disorder rest on a
combination of psychological speculation and dubious evidence
provided by a Russian autopsy after the alleged capture of the burnt
remains of his body in Berlin. And stories about his Vienna time
such as that of his alleged obsession with and attempted rape of a

model engaged to a half-Jew, and his resort to prostitutes, derive
from a single source — the self-serving supposed recollections of
Josef Greiner, who may have known Hitler briefly in Vienna — with
no credence and which can be regarded as baseless. However,
Kubizek’s account, together with the language Hitler himself used in
Mein Kampf, does point at the least to an acutely disturbed and
repressed sexual development.

Hitler’s prudishness, shored up by Schonerian principles, was to a
degree merely in line with middle-class outward standards of
morality in the Vienna of his time. These standards had been
challenged by the openly erotic art of Gustav Klimt and literature of
Arthur Schnitzler. But the solid bourgeois puritanism prevailed — at
least as a thin veneer covering the seamier side of a city teeming
with vice and prostitution. Where decency demanded that women
were scarcely allowed even to show an ankle, Hitler’s
embarrassment — and the rapidity with which he fled with his friend
— when a prospective landlady during the search for a room for
Kubizek let her silk dressing-gown fall open to reveal that she was
wearing nothing but a pair of knickers was understandable. But his
prudishness went far beyond this. It amounted, according to
Kubizek’s account, to a deep disgust and repugnance at sexual
activity. Hitler avoided contact with women, meeting with cold
indifference during visits to the opera alleged attempts by young
women, probably seeing him as something of an oddity, to flirt with
or tease him. He was repelled by homosexuality. He refrained from
masturbation. Prostitution horrified, but fascinated, him. He
associated it with venereal disease, which petrified him. Following a
visit to the theatre one evening to see Frank Wedekind’s play
Friihlings Erwachen (Spring Awakening), which dealt with sexual
problems of youth, Hitler suddenly took Kubizek’s arm and led him
into Spittelberggasse to see at first hand the red-light district, or
‘sink of iniquity’ as he called it. Adolf took his friend not once, but
twice, along the row of lit windows behind which scantily clad
women advertised their wares and touted for custom. His
voyeurism was then cloaked in middle-class self-righteousness by

the lecture he proceeded to give Kubizek on the evils of
prostitution. Later, in Mein Kampf, he was to link the Jews —
echoing a commonplace current among antisemites of his Vienna
years — with prostitution. But if this association was present in his
mind in 1908, Kubizek did not record it.

Though seemingly repelled by sex, Hitler was at the same time
plainly fascinated by it. He discussed sexual matters quite often in
lengthy talks late at night with Gustl, regaling him, wrote Kubizek,
on the need for sexual purity to protect what he grandly called the
‘flame of life’; explaining to his naive friend, following a brief
encounter with a businessman who invited them to a meal, about
homosexuality; and ranting about prostitution and moral decadence.
Hitler’s disturbed sexuality, his recoiling from physical contact, his
fear of women, his inability to forge genuine friendship and
emptiness in human relations, presumably had their roots in
childhood experiences of a troubled family life. Attempts to explain
them will inevitably remain speculative. Later rumours of Hitler’s
sexual perversions are similarly based on dubious evidence.
Conjecture — and there has been much of it — that sexual repression
later gave way to sordid sado-masochistic practices rests, whatever
the suspicions, on little more than a combination of rumour,
hearsay, surmise, and innuendo, often spiced up by Hitler’s political
enemies. And even if the alleged repulsive perversions really were
his private proclivities, how exactly they would help explain the
rapid descent of the complex and sophisticated German state into
gross inhumanity after 1933 is not readily self-evident.

Hitler was to describe his life in Vienna as one of hardship and
misery, hunger and poverty. This was notably economical with the
truth as regards the months he spent in Stumpergasse in 1908
(though it was accurate enough as a portrayal of his condition in the
autumn and winter of 1909-10). Even more misleading was his
comment in Mein Kampf that ‘the orphan’s pension to which I was
entitled was not enough for me even to live on, and so I was faced
with the problem of somehow making my own living’. As we have
noted, the loan from his aunt, his share of his mother’s legacy, and

his monthly orphan’s pension certainly gave him sufficient to live
comfortably — perhaps even equivalent to that of a young teacher
over a year or so at least. And his appearance, when he put on his
fineries for an evening at the opera, was anything but that of a
down-and-out. When Kubizek first saw him on their reunion at the
Westbahnhof in February 1908, young Adolf was wearing a good-
quality overcoat, and dark hat. He was carrying the walking-stick
with the ivory handle that he had had in Linz, and ‘appeared almost
elegant’. As for working, in those first months of 1908, as we have
noted, Hitler certainly did nothing whatsoever about making his
own living, or taking any steps to ensure that he was on the right
track to do so.

If he had a reasonable income during his time with Kubizek,
Hitler nevertheless scarcely led a life of wild extravagance. His
living conditions were unenviable. The sixth district of Vienna, close
to the Westbahnhof, where Stumpergasse was situated, was an
unattractive part of the city, with its dismal, unlit streets and scruffy
tenement blocks overhung with smoke and soot surrounding dark
inner courtyards. Kubizek himself was appalled at some of the
accommodation on view when he was looking for a room the day
after he had arrived in Vienna. And the lodging he and Adolf came
to share was a miserable room that stank constantly of paraffin,
with crumbling plaster peeling off dank walls, and bug-ridden beds
and furniture. The lifestyle was frugal. Little was spent on eating
and drinking. Adolf was not a vegetarian at that time, but his main
daily fare usually consisted only of bread and butter, sweet flour
puddings, and often in the afternoons a piece of poppy- or nut-cake.
Sometimes he went without food altogether. When Gustl’s mother
sent a food parcel every fortnight, it was like a feast. Adolf drank
milk as a rule, or sometimes fruit-juice, but no alcohol. Nor did he
smoke. The one luxury was the opera. How much he spent on the
almost daily visits to an opera or a concert can only be guessed. But
at 2 Kronen for a standing place — it infuriated Hitler that young
officers more interested in the social occasion than the music had to
pay only 10 Heller, a twentieth of the sum — regular attendance

over some months would certainly begin to eat away at whatever
savings he had. Hitler himself remarked, over three decades later: ‘I
was so poor, during the Viennese period of my life, that I had to
restrict myself to only the very best performances. This explains
that already at that time I heard Tristan thirty or forty times, and
always from the best companies.’ By the summer of 1908, he must
have made big inroads into the money he had inherited. But he
presumably still had some of his savings left, as well as the orphan’s
pension that Kubizek presumed was his only income, which would
allow him to last out for a further year.

Though Kubizek was unaware of it, by summer the time he was
spending with his friend in Vienna was drawing to a close. By early
July 1908, Gustl had passed his examinations at the Conservatoire
and term had ended. He was going back to Linz to stay with his
parents until autumn. He arranged to send Frau Zakreys the rent
every month to guarantee retention of the room, and Adolf, again
saying how little he was looking forward to remaining alone in the
room, accompanied him to the Westbahnhof to see him off. They
were not to meet again until the Anschlufg in 1938. Adolf did send
Gustl a number of postcards during the summer, one from the
Waldviertel, where he had gone without enthusiasm to spend some
time with his family — the last occasion he would see his relatives
for many years. Nothing suggested to Kubizek that he would not be
rejoining his friend in the autumn. But when he left the train at the
Westbahnhof on his return in November, Hitler was nowhere to be
seen. Some time in the late summer or autumn, he had moved out
of Stumpergasse. Frau Zakreys told Kubizek that he had left his
lodgings without giving any forwarding address. By 18 November
he was registered with the police as a ‘student’ living at new
lodgings in room 16 of Felberstrafge 22, close by the Westbahnhof,
and a more airy room — presumably costing more — than that he had
occupied in Stumpergasse.

What had caused the sudden and unannounced break with
Kubizek? The most likely explanation is Hitler’s second rejection —
this time he was not even permitted to take the examination — by

the Academy of Fine Arts in October 1908. He had probably not
told Kubizek he was applying again. Presumably he had spent the
entire year in the knowledge that he had a second chance and in the
expectation that he would not fail this time. Now his hopes of an
artistic career lay totally in ruins. He could not now face his friend
again as a confirmed failure.

Kubizek’s recollections, for all their flaws, paint a portrait of the
young Hitler whose character traits are recognizable with hindsight
in the later party leader and dictator. The indolence in lifestyle but
accompanied by manic enthusiasm and energy sucked into his
fantasies, the dilettantism, the lack of reality and sense of
proportion, the opinionated autodidactism, the egocentrism, the
quirky intolerance, the sudden rise to anger and the outbursts of
rage, the diatribes of venom poured out on everyone and
everything blocking the rise of the great artist — all these can be
seen in the nineteen-year-old Hitler portrayed by Kubizek. Failure in
Vienna had turned Hitler into an angry and frustrated young man
increasingly at odds with the world around him. But he was not yet
the Hitler who comes fully into view after 1919, and whose political
ideas were fully outlined in Mein Kampf.

Kubizek had had time to read Mein Kampf by the time he wrote
his own account of Hitler’s political development — something which
in any case was of less interest to him than matters cultural and
artistic. His passages are in places heavily redolent of Hitler’s own
tale of his ‘political awakening’ in Vienna. They are not, therefore,
reliable and often not credible — scarcely so when he claims Hitler
was a pacifist, an opponent of war at this stage. However, there is
no reason to doubt Hitler’s growing political awareness. His bitter
contempt for the multi-language parliament (which Kubizek visited
with him), his strident German nationalism, his intense detestation
of the multinational Habsburg state, his revulsion at ‘the ethnic
babel on the streets of Vienna’, and ‘the foreign mixture of peoples
which had begun to corrode this old site of German culture’ — all
these were little more than an accentuation, a personalized
radicalization, of what he had first imbibed in Linz. Hitler fully

described them in Mein Kampf. The first months of the Viennese
experience doubtless already deepened and sharpened these views.
However, even by Hitler’s own account it took two years in Vienna
for his attitude towards the Jews to crystallize. Kubizek’s assertion
that Hitler attained his ‘world-view’ during the time they were
together in Vienna is an exaggeration. Hitler’s rounded ‘world-view’
was still not formed. The pathological hatred of the Jews that was
its cornerstone had still to emerge.

Ill

There are no witnesses to Hitler’s activity during the nine months
that he stayed in Felberstraf$e. This phase of his life in Vienna
remains obscure. It has often been presumed, nevertheless, that it
was in precisely these months that he became an obsessive racial
antisemite.

Close to where Hitler lived in Felberstraf§e was a kiosk selling
tobacco and newspapers. Whatever newspapers and periodicals he
bought beyond those that he devoured so avidly in cafés, it was
probably from this kiosk. Which exactly he read of the many cheap
and trashy magazines in circulation at the time is uncertain. One of
them was very likely a racist periodical called Ostara. The magazine,
which first appeared in 1905, was the product of the extraordinary
and warped imagination of an eccentric former Cistercian monk,
who came to be known as Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels (though his real
name was plain Adolf Lanz). He later founded his own order, the
‘New Templar Order’ (replete with a full panoply of mystical signs
and symbols, including the swastika), in a ruined castle, Burg
Werfenstein, on a romantic stretch of the Danube between Linz and
Vienna.

Lanz and his followers were obsessed by homoerotic notions of a
manichean struggle between the heroic and creative ‘blond’ race
and a race of predatory dark ‘beast-men’ who preyed on the ‘blond’
women with animal lust and bestial instincts that were corrupting
and destroying mankind and its culture. Lanz’s recipe, laid down in

Ostara, for overcoming the evils of the modern world and restoring
the domination of the ‘blond race’ was racial purity and racial
struggle, involving the slavery and forced sterilization or even
extermination of the inferior races, the crushing of socialism,
democracy, and feminism which were seen as the vehicles of their
corrupting influence, and the complete subordination of aryan
women to their husbands. It amounted to a creed of ‘blue-eyed
blondes of all nations, unite’. There are indeed elements in common
between the bizarre fantasies of Lanz and his band of woman-
hating, racist crackpots and the programme of racial selection which
the SS were to put into practice during the Second World War.
Whether Lanz’s ideas had direct influence on Himmler’s SS is,
however, questionable. Unsustainable is Lanz’s claim to a unique
place in history as the man ‘who gave Hitler his ideas’.

The main evidence that Hitler was acquainted with Ostara comes
from a post-war interview in which Lanz claimed to have
remembered Hitler, during the time he lived in Felberstrafse in
1909, paying him a visit and asking him for back copies of the
magazine. Since Hitler looked so run-down, Lanz went on, he let
him have the copies for nothing, and gave him 2 Kronen for his
journey home. How Lanz knew that this young man had been
Hitler, when it was to be well over ten years before the latter
would become a local celebrity even in Munich, he was never asked
in the interview more than forty years after the purported meeting.
Another witness to Hitler’s reading of Ostara in post-war interviews
was Josef Greiner, the author of some fabricated ‘recollections’ of
Hitler in his Vienna years. Greiner did not mention Ostara in his
book, but, when later questioned about it in the mid-1950s,
‘remembered’ that Hitler had a large pile of Ostara magazines while
he was living in the Men’s Home from 1910 to 1913, and had
vehemently supported Lanz’s racial theories in heated discussions
with an ex-Catholic priest called Grill (who does not figure in his
book at all). A third witness, a former Nazi functionary called Elsa
Schmidt-Falk, could only remember that she had heard Hitler
mention Lanz in the context of homosexuality, and Ostara in

connection with the banning of Lanz’s works (though there is in fact
no evidence of a ban).

Most likely, Hitler did read Ostara along with other racist pulp
which was prominent on Vienna newspaper stands. But we cannot
be certain. Nor, if he did read it, can we be sure what he believed.
His first known statements on antisemitism immediately following
the First World War betray no traces of Lanz’s obscure racial
doctrine. He was later frequently scornful of volkisch sects and the
extremes of Germanic cultism. As far as can be seen, if we discount
Elsa Schmidt-Falk’s doubtful testimony, he never mentioned Lanz by
name. For the Nazi regime, the bizarre Austrian racist eccentric, far
from being held up to praise, was to be accused of ‘falsifying racial
thought through secret doctrine’.

When Hitler, his savings almost exhausted, was forced to leave
Felberstrafge in mid-August 1909 to move for a very short time to
shabbier accommodation in nearby Sechshauserstrafse 58, it was
certainly not as a devotee of Lanz von Liebenfels. Nor, anti-Jewish
though he undoubtedly already was as a Schonerer supporter, is it
likely that he had yet found the key to the ills of the world in a
doctrine of racial antisemitism.

Hitler stayed in Sechshauserstrafse for less than a month. And
when he left, on 16 September 1909, it was without filling in the
required police registration form, without leaving a forwarding
address, and probably without paying his rent. During the next
months, Hitler did learn the meaning of poverty. His later
recollection that autumn 1909 had been ‘an endlessly bitter time’
was not an exaggeration. All his savings had now vanished. He must
have left some address with his guardian for his orphan’s pension of
25 Kronen to be sent to Vienna each month. But that was not
enough to keep body and soul together. During the wet and cold
autumn of 1909 he lived rough, sleeping in the open, as long as the
weather held, probably in cheap lodgings when conditions forced
him indoors.

Hitler had now reached rock-bottom. Some time in the weeks
before Christmas 1909, thin and bedraggled, in filthy, lice-ridden

clothes, his feet sore from walking around, Hitler joined the human
flotsam and jetsam finding their way to the large, recently
established doss-house for the homeless in Meidling, not far from
Schonbrunn Palace. The social decline of the petty-bourgeois so
fearful of joining the proletariat was complete. The twenty-year-old
would-be artistic genius had joined the tramps, winos, and down-
and-outs in society’s basement.

It was at this time that he met Reinhold Hanisch, whose
testimony, doubtful though it is in places, is all that casts light on
the next phase of Hitler’s time in Vienna. Hanisch, living under the
assumed name of ‘Fritz Walter’, came originally from the
Sudetenland and had a police record for a number of petty
misdemeanours. He was a self-styled draughtsman, but in reality
had drifted through various temporary jobs as a domestic servant
and casual labourer before tramping his way across Germany from
Berlin to Vienna. He encountered a miserable-looking Hitler, down
at heel in a shabby blue check suit, tired and hungry, in the hostel
dormitory one late autumn night, shared some bread with him and
told tales of Berlin to the young enthusiast for all things German.
The hostel was a night-shelter offering short-term accommodation
only. A bath or shower, disinfection of clothes, soup and bread, and
a bed in the dormitory were provided. But during the day the
inmates were turned out to fend for themselves. Hitler, looking in a
sorry state and in depressed mood, went in the mornings along with
other destitutes to a nearby convent in Gumpendorferstrafge where
the nuns doled out soup. The time was otherwise spent visiting
public warming-rooms, or trying to earn a bit of money. Hanisch
took him off to shovel snow, but without an overcoat Hitler was in
no condition to stick at it for long. He offered to carry bags for
passengers at the Westbahnhof, but his appearance probably did not
win him many customers. Whether he did any other manual labour
during the years he spent in Vienna is doubtful. While his savings
had lasted, he had not been prepared to entertain the prospect of
working. At the time he was in most need of money, he was
physically not up to it. Later, even Hanisch, his ‘business associate’,

lost his temper over Hitler’s idleness while eking out a living by
selling paintings. The story he told in Mein Kampf about learning
about trade unionism and Marxism the hard way through his
maltreatment while working on a building site is almost certainly
fictional. Hanisch, at any rate, never heard the story at the time
from Hitler, and later did not believe it. The ‘legend’ probably drew
on the general anti-socialist propaganda in the Vienna of Hitler’s
day.

Hanisch had meanwhile thought of a better idea than manual
labouring. Hitler had told him of his background, and was
persuaded by Hanisch to ask his family for some money, probably
under the pretext that he needed it for his studies. Within a short
time he received the princely sum of 50 Kronen, almost certainly
from his Aunt Johanna. With that he could buy himself an overcoat
from the government pawn shop. With this long coat and his greasy
trilby, shoes looking like those of a nomad, hair over his collar, and
dark fuzz on his chin, Hitler’s appearance even provoked his fellow
vagrants to remark on it. They nicknamed him ‘Ohm Paul Kriger’,
after the Boer leader. But the gift from his aunt meant that better
times were on the way. He was now able to acquire the materials
needed to begin the little business venture that Hanisch had
dreamed up. On hearing from Hitler that he could paint — Hitler
actually told him he had been at the Academy — Hanisch suggested
he should paint scenes of Vienna which he would then peddle for
him, and they would share the proceeds. Whether this partnership
began already in the doss-house, or only after Hitler had moved, on
9 February 1910, to the more salubrious surrounds of the Men’s
Home in the north of the city is unclear from Hanisch’s garbled
account. What is certain is that with his aunt’s gift, the move to
Meldemannstrafge, and his new business arrangement with Hanisch,
Hitler was now over the worst.

The Men’s Home was a big step up from the Meidling hostel. The
500 or so residents were not down-and-out vagrants, but, for the
most part, a mixed bunch of individuals — some, clerks and even
former academics and pensioned officers, just down on their luck,

others simply passing through, looking for work or in temporary
employment, all without a family home to go to. Unlike the hostel,
the Men’s Home, built a few years earlier, offered a modicum of
privacy, and for an overnight price of only 50 Heller. Residents had
their own cubicles, which had to be vacated during the day but
could be retained on a more or less indefinite basis. There was a
canteen where meals and alcohol-free drinks could be obtained, and
a kitchen where residents could prepare their own food; there were
washrooms and lockers for private possessions; in the basement
were baths, along with a cobbler’s, a tailor’s, and a hairdresser’s, a
laundry, and cleaning facilities; there was a small library on the
ground floor, and on the first floor lounges and a reading-room
where newpapers were available. Most of the residents were out
during the day, but a group of around fifteen to twenty, mainly
from lower-middle-class backgrounds and seen as the ‘intelligentsia’,
usually gathered in a smaller room, known as the ‘work-room’ or
‘writing-room’, to undertake odd jobs — painting advertisements,
writing out addresses and the like. This is where Hanisch and Hitler
set up operations.

Hanisch’s role was to hawk Hitler’s mainly postcard-size paintings
around pubs. He also found a market with frame-makers and
upholsterers who could make use of cheap illustrations. Most of the
dealers with whom he had a good, regular trade were Jewish.
Hitler’s view, according to Hanisch, was that Jews were better
businessmen and more reliable customers than ‘Christian’ dealers.
More remarkably, in the light of later events and his own claims
about the importance of the Vienna period for the development of
his antisemitism, his closest partner (apart from Hanisch) in his
little art-production business, Josef Neumann, was also a Jew — and
one with whom Hitler was, it seems, on friendly terms.

Hitler invariably copied his pictures from others, sometimes
following visits to museums or galleries to find suitable subjects. He
was lazy and had to be chivvied by Hanisch, who could offload the
pictures faster than Hitler painted them. The usual rate of
production was about one picture a day, and Hanisch reckoned to

sell it for around 5 Kronen, split between him and Hitler. In this
fashion, they managed to make a modest living.

Politics was a frequent topic of conversation in the reading-room
of the Men’s Home, and the atmosphere easily became heated, with
tempers flaring. Hitler took full part. His violent attacks on the
Social Democrats caused trouble with some of the inmates. He was
known for his admiration for Schonerer and Karl Hermann Wolf
(founder and leader of the German Radical Party, with its main base
in the Sudetenland). He also waxed lyrical about the achievements
of Karl Lueger, the social reformist but rabble-rousing antisemitic
mayor of Vienna. When he was not holding forth on politics, Hitler
was lecturing his comrades — keen to listen or not — on the wonders
of Wagner’s music and the brilliance of Gottfried Semper’s designs
of Vienna’s monumental buildings.

Whether politics or art, the chance to involve himself in the
reading-room ‘debates’ was more than sufficient to distract Hitler
from working. By summer, Hanisch had become more and more
irritated with Hitler’s failure to keep up with orders. Hitler claimed
he could not simply paint to order, but had to be in the right mood.
Hanisch accused him of only painting when he needed to keep the
wolf from the door. Following a windfall from the sale of one of his
paintings, Hitler even disappeared from the Men’s Home for a few
days in June with Neumann. According to Hanisch, Hitler and
Neumann spent their time sight-seeing in Vienna and looking
around museums. More likely, they had other ‘business’ plans,
which, then, quickly fell through, possibly including a quick visit to
the Waldviertel to try to squeeze a bit more money out of Aunt
Johanna. Hitler and his cronies in the Men’s Home were at this time
prepared to entertain any dotty scheme — a miracle hair-restorer
was one such idea — that would bring in a bit of money. Whatever
the reason for his temporary absence, after five days, his money
spent, Hitler returned to the Men’s Home and the partnership with
Hanisch. Relations now, however, became increasingly strained and
the bad feeling eventually exploded over a picture Hitler had
painted, larger than usual in size, of the parliament building.

Through an intermediary — another Jewish dealer in his group in the
Men’s Home by the name of Siegfried Loffner — Hitler accused
Hanisch of cheating him by withholding 50 Kronen he allegedly
received for the picture, together with a further 9 Kronen for a
watercolour. The matter was brought to the attention of the police,
and Hanisch was sentenced to a few days in jail — but for using the
false name of Fritz Walter. Hitler never received what he felt was
owing to him for the picture.

With Hanisch’s disappearance, Hitler’s life recedes into near
obscurity for two years or so. When he next comes into view, in
1912-13, he is still in residence in the Men’s Home, now a well-
established member of the community, and a central figure among
his own group — the ‘intelligentsia’ who occupied the writing-room.
He was by now well over the depths of degradation he experienced
in 1909 in the doss-house, even if continuing to drift aimlessly. He
could earn a modest income from the sale of his pictures of the
Karlskirche and other scenes of ‘Old Vienna’. His outgoings were
low, since he lived so frugally. His living costs in the Men’s Home
were extremely modest: he ate cheaply, did not drink, smoked a
cigarette only rarely, and had as his only luxury the occasional
purchase of a standing-place at the theatre or opera (about which he
would then regale the writing-room ‘intellectuals’ for hours).
Descriptions of his appearance at this time are contradictory. A
fellow resident in the Men’s Home in 1912 later described Hitler as
shabbily dressed and unkempt, wearing a long greyish coat, worn at
the sleeves, and battered old hat, trousers full of holes, and shoes
stuffed with paper. He still had shoulder-length hair and a ragged
beard. This is compatible with the description given by Hanisch
which, though not precisely dated, appears from the context to refer
to 1909-10. On the other hand, according to Jacob Altenberg, one
of his Jewish art dealers, in the later phase at least in the Men’s
Home Hitler was clean-shaven, took care to keep his hair cut, and
wore clothes which, though old and worn, were kept neat. Given
what Kubizek wrote about Hitler’s fussiness about personal hygiene
when they were together in 1908, and what was later little short of

a cleanliness fetishism, Altenberg’s testimony rings truer than that
of the anonymous acquaintance for the final period in
Meldemannstrafse.

But, whatever his appearance, Hitler was scarcely enjoying the
lifestyle of a man who had come by a substantial windfall — what
would have amounted to a king’s ransom for someone living in a
men’s hostel. Yet this is what was long believed. It was suggested —
though based on guesswork, not genuine evidence — that towards
the end of 1910 Hitler had become the recipient of a sizeable sum,
perhaps as much as 3,800 Kronen, which represented the life-
savings of his Aunt Johanna. Post-war inquiries indicated that this
was the amount withdrawn from her savings account by Johanna on
1 December 1910, some four months before she died, leaving no
will. The suspicion was that the large sum had gone to Adolf. This
feeling was enhanced by the fact that his half-sister Angela, still
looking after his sister Paula, soon afterwards, in 1911, staked a
claim to the whole of the orphan’s pension, still at that time divided
equally between the two children. Adolf who, ‘on account of his
training as an artist had received substantial sums from his aunt,
Johanna Polzl’, conceded that he was in a position to maintain
himself, and was forced to concede the 25 Kronen a month which he
had up to then received from his guardian. But, as we have already
noted, the household account-book of the Hitler family makes plain
that Adolf, alongside smaller gifts from ‘Hanitante’, received from
her a loan — amounting in reality to a gift —- of 924 Kronen, probably
in 1907 and providing him with the material basis of his first,
relatively comfortable, year in Vienna. Whatever became of Aunt
Johanna’s money in December 1910, there is not the slightest
indication that it went to Hitler. And the loss of the 25 Kronen a
month orphan’s pension would have amounted to a serious dent in
his income.

Though his life had stabilized while he had been in the Men’s
Home, during the time he had been trafficking in paintings, Hitler
seems to have remained unsettled. Karl Honisch — keen to distance
himself from his near-namesake Hanisch, of whom he had heard

nothing good — knew Hitler in 1913. Honisch described him as
slight in build, poorly nourished, with hollow cheeks, dark hair
flopping in his face, and wearing shabby clothes. Hitler was rarely
absent from the Home and sat each day in the same corner of the
writing-room near the window, drawing and painting on a long oak-
table. This was known as his place, and any newcomer venturing to
take it was rapidly reminded by the other inmates that ‘this place is
taken. Herr Hitler sits there.’ Among the writing-room regulars,
Hitler was seen as a somewhat unusual, artistic type. He himself
wrote later: ‘I believe that those who knew me in those days took
me for an eccentric.’ But, other than his painting skills, no one
imagined he had any special talents. Though well regarded, he had
a way, noted Honisch, of keeping his distance from the others and
‘not letting anyone come too close’. He could be withdrawn, sunk in
a book or his own thoughts. But he was known to have a quick
temper. This could flare up at any time, particularly in the frequent
political debates that took place. Hitler’s strong views on politics
were plain to all. He would often sit quietly when a discussion
started up, putting in the odd word here or there but otherwise
carrying on with his drawing. If he took exception to something
said, however, he would jump up from his place, hurling his brush
or pencil on the table, and heatedly and forcefully make himself felt
before, on occasion, breaking off in mid-flow and with a wave of
resignation at the incomprehension of his comrades, taking up his
drawing again. Two subjects above all roused his aggression: the
Jesuits and the ‘Reds’. No mention was made of tirades against the
Jews.

The criticism of the ‘Jesuits’ suggests that some embers of his
former enthusiasm for Schonerer’s vehement anti-Catholicism were
still warm, though the Schonerer movement had by this time
effectively collapsed. His hatred for the Social Democrats was also
long established by this time. His own version in Mein Kampf of the
emergence of this hatred tells the story — almost certainly fictional —
of the victimization and personal threats he allegedly experienced,
on account of his rejection of their political views and refusal to join

a trades union, at the hands of Social Democrat workers when he
was employed for a short time on a building site.

There is, in fact, no need to look beyond the strength of Hitler’s
pan-German nationalism as an explanation of his detestation of the
internationalism of the Social Democrats. The radical nationalist
propaganda of Franz Stein’s pan-German ‘working-class movement’,
with its repeated shrill attacks on ‘social democratic bestialities’ and
‘red terror’, and its boundless agitation against Czech workers, was
the type of ‘socialism’ soaked up by Hitler. A more underlying
source of the hatred most likely lay in Hitler’s pronounced sense of
social and cultural superiority towards the working class that Social
Democracy represented. ‘I do not know what horrified me most at
that time,’ he later wrote of his contact with those of the ‘lower
classes’: ‘the economic misery of my companions, their moral and
ethical coarseness, or the low level of their intellectual
development.’

Though Hitler’s account of his first encounter with Social
Democrats is probably apocryphal, status-consciousness runs
through it, not least in his comment that at that time ‘my clothing
was still more or less in order, my speech cultivated, and my
manner reserved’. Given such status-consciousness, the level of
degradation he must have felt in 1909-10 when the threat of social
decline into the proletariat for a time became dire reality can be
readily imagined. But far from eliciting any solidarity with the
ideals of the working-class movement, this merely sharpened his
antagonism towards it. Not social and political theories, but
survival, struggle, and ‘every man for himself’? marked the
philosophy of the doss-house.

Hitler went on in Mein Kampf to stress the hard struggle for
existence of the ‘upstart’, who had risen ‘by his own efforts from his
previous position in life to a higher one’, that ‘kills all pity’ and
destroys ‘feeling for the misery of those who have remained
behind’. This puts into context his professed interest in ‘the social
question’ while he was in Vienna. His ingrained sense of superiority
meant that, far from arousing sympathy for the destitute and the

disadvantaged, the ‘social question’ for him amounted to a search
for scapegoats to explain his own social decline and degradation.
‘By drawing me within its sphere of suffering,’ the ‘social question’,
he wrote, ‘did not seem to invite me to “study”, but to experience it
in my own skin.’

By the end of his Vienna period, it is unlikely that Hitler’s
detestation of Social Democracy, firmly established though it was,
had gone much beyond that which had been current in Schonerer’s
pan-German nationalism — apart from the additional radicality
deriving from his own bitter first-hand experiences of the misery
and degradation that enhanced his utter rejection of international
socialism as a solution. That his hatred of Social Democracy had
already by this date, as Hitler claimed in Mein Kampf, married with
a racial theory of antisemitism to give him a distinctive ‘world-
view’ which remained thereafter unchanged, can be discounted.

Why and when did Hitler become the fixated, pathological
antisemite known from the writing of his first political tract in 1919
down to the writing of his testament in the Berlin bunker in 1945?
Since his paranoid hatred was to shape policies that culminated in
the killing of millions of Jews, this is self-evidently an important
question. The answer is, however, less clear than we should like. In
truth, we do not know for certain why, or even when, Hitler turned
into a manic and obsessive antisemite.

Hitler’s own version is laid out in some well-known and striking
passages in Mein Kampf. According to this, he had not been an
antisemite in Linz. On coming to Vienna, he had at first been
alienated by the antisemitic press there. But the obsequiousness of
the mainstream press in its treatment of the Habsburg court and its
vilification of the German Kaiser gradually led him to the ‘more
decent’ and ‘more appetizing’ line taken in the antisemitic paper the
Deutsches Volksblatt. Growing admiration for Karl Lueger — ‘the
greatest German mayor of all times’ — helped to change his attitude

towards the Jews — ‘my greatest transformation of all’ — and within
two years (or in another account a single year) the transformation
was complete. Hitler highlights, however, a single episode which
opened his eyes to ‘the Jewish Question’.

Once, as I was strolling through the Inner City, I suddenly encountered an apparition in a
black caftan and black hair locks. Is this a Jew? was my first thought.

For, to be sure, they had not looked like that in Linz. I observed the man furtively and
cautiously, but the longer I stared at this foreign face, scrutinizing feature for feature, the
more my first question assumed a new form:

Is this a German?

Following this encounter, Hitler continued, he started to buy
antisemitic pamphlets. He was now able to see that Jews ‘were not
Germans of a special religion, but a people in themselves’. Vienna
now appeared in a different light. ‘Wherever I went, I began to see
Jews, and the more I saw, the more sharply they became
distinguished in my eyes from the rest of humanity.’

Now, to stay with his own account, his revulsion rapidly grew.
The language Hitler uses in these pages of Mein Kampf betrays a
morbid fear of uncleanliness, dirt, and disease — all of which he
associated with Jews. He also quickly formed his newly-found
hatred into a conspiracy theory. He now linked the Jews with every
evil he perceived: the liberal press, cultural life, prostitution, and —
most significant of all — identified them as the leading force in
Social Democracy. At this, ‘the scales dropped from my eyes’.
Everything connected with Social Democracy — party leaders,
Reichsrat deputies, trade union secretaries, and the Marxist press
that he devoured with loathing — now seemed to him to be Jewish.
But this ‘recognition’, he wrote, gave him great satisfaction. His
already existent hatred of Social Democracy, that party’s
antinationalism, now fell into place: its leadership was ‘almost
exclusively in the hands of a foreign people’. ‘Only now,’ Hitler
remarked, ‘did I become thoroughly acquainted with the seducer of
our people.’ He had linked Marxism and antisemitism through what
he called ‘the Jewish doctrine of Marxism’.

It is a graphic account. But it is not corroborated by the other
sources that cast light on Hitler’s time in Vienna. Indeed, in some
respects it is directly at variance with them. It is generally accepted
that, for all the problems with the autobiographical parts of Mein
Kampf, Hitler was indeed converted to manic racial antisemitism
while in Vienna. But the available evidence, beyond Hitler’s own
words, offers little to confirm that view. Interpretation rests
ultimately on the balance of probabilities.

Kubizek claimed Hitler was already an antisemite before leaving
Linz. In contrast to Hitler’s assertion that his father had
‘cosmopolitan views’ and would have regarded antisemitism as
‘cultural backwardness’, Kubizek stated that Alois’s regular drinking
cronies in Leonding were Schonerer supporters and that he himself
was certainly therefore anti-Jewish. He pointed also to the openly
antisemitic teachers Hitler encountered in the Realschule. He
allegedly recalled, too, that Adolf had said to him one day, as they
passed the small synagogue: ‘That doesn’t belong in Linz.’ For
Kubizek, Vienna had made Hitler’s antisemitism more radical. But it
had not created it. In his opinion, Hitler had gone to Vienna ‘already
as a pronounced antisemite’. Kubizek went on to recount one or two
episodes of Hitler’s aversion to Jews during the time they were
together in Vienna. He claimed an encounter with a Galician Jew
was the caftan story of Mein Kampf. But this, and a purported visit
to a synagogue in which Hitler took Kubizek along to witness a
Jewish wedding, have the appearance of an outright fabrication.
Palpably false is Kubizek’s assertion that Hitler joined the
Antisemitenbund (Antisemitic League) during the months in 1908
that the friends were together in Vienna. There was no such
organization in Austria-Hungary before 1918.

In fact, Kubizek is generally unconvincing in the passages
devoted to the early manifestations of Hitler’s antisemitism. These
are among the least trustworthy sections of his account — partly
drawing on Mein Kampf, partly inventing episodes which were not
present in the original draft version of his recollections, and in
places demonstrably incorrect. Kubizek was keen to distance himself

in his post-war memoirs from the radical views of his friend on the
‘Jewish Question’. It suited him to emphasize that Hitler had from
Linz days hated the Jews. His suggestion that Hitler’s father (whom
he had not known) had been a pronounced antisemite is probably
incorrect. Alois Hitler’s own more moderate form of pan-Germanism
had differed from that of the Schonerer movement in its continued
allegiance to the Emperor of Austria and accorded with the line
adopted by the dominant party in Upper Austria, the Deutsche
Volkspartei (German People’s Party), which admitted Jews to
membership. The vehemently antisemitic as well as radical German
nationalist Schonerer movement certainly had a strong following in
and around Linz, and no doubt included some at least of Hitler’s
teachers among its supporters. But antisemitism seems to have been
relatively unimportant in his school compared with the antagonism
towards the Czechs. Hitler’s own later recollection was probably in
this respect not inaccurate, when he told Albert Speer that he had
become aware of the ‘nationalities problem’ — by which he meant
vehement hostility towards the Czechs —- at school, but the ‘danger
of Jewry’ had only been made plain to him in Vienna.

The young Hitler, himself taken while still in Linz by Schonerer’s
ideas, could scarcely have missed the emphatic racial antisemitism
which was so integral to them. But for the Schonerer supporters in
the Linz of Hitler’s day, antisemitism appears to have been a
subdominant theme in the cacophony of anti-Czech clamour and
trumpeted Germanomania. It certainly did not prevent Hitler’s
warm expressions of gratitude in postcards and the present of one of
his watercolours to Dr Bloch, the Jewish physician who had treated
his mother in her last illness. The deep, visceral hatred of his later
antisemitism was of a different order altogether. That was certainly
not present in his Linz years.

There is no evidence that Hitler was distinctively antisemitic by
the time he parted company with Kubizek in the summer of 1908.
Hitler himself claimed that he became an antisemite within two
years of arriving in Vienna. Could, then, the transformation be
placed in the year he spent, mainly in Felberstrafgse, between

leaving Kubizek and becoming a vagrant? The testimony of Lanz
von Liebenfels would fit this chronology. But we have seen that this
is of highly doubtful value. Hitler’s descent into abject poverty in
autumn 1909 might seem an obvious time to search for a scapegoat
and find it in the figure of the Jew. But he had the opportunity less
then than at any other time in Vienna to ‘read up’ on the subject, as
he claimed in Mein Kampf.

Not only that: Reinhold Hanisch, his close companion over the
following months, was adamant that Hitler ‘in those days was by no
means a Jew hater. He became one afterwards.’ Hanisch
emphasized Hitler’s Jewish friends and contacts in the Men’s Home
to demonstrate the point. A one-eyed locksmith called Robinsohn
spared Hitler some small change to help him out financially from
time to time. (The man’s name was actually Simon Robinson,
traceable in the Men’s Home in 1912-13.) Josef Neumann, as we
have seen, became, as Hanisch put it, ‘a real friend’ to Hitler. He
was said to have ‘liked Hitler very much’ and to have been ‘of
course highly esteemed’ by him. A postcard salesman, Siegfried
Loffner (misnamed Loeffler by Hanisch), was also ‘one of Hitler’s
circle of acquaintances’, and, as we remarked, took sides with him
in the acrimonious conflict with Hanisch in 1910. Hitler preferred,
as we observed, to sell his pictures to Jewish dealers, and one of
them, Jacob Altenberg, subsequently spoke well of the business
relationship they had conducted. Hanisch’s testimony finds
confirmation in the later comment of the anonymous resident of the
Men’s Home in the spring of 1912, that ‘Hitler got along
exceptionally well with Jews, and said at one time that they were a
clever people who stick together better than the Germans do’.

The three years that Hitler spent in the Men’s Home certainly
gave him every opportunity to pore over antisemitic newpapers,
pamphlets, and cheap literature. But, leaving aside the fact that the
chronology no longer matches Hitler’s own assertion of a
transformation within two years of arriving in Vienna, Karl
Honisch, we saw, makes a point of emphasizing Hitler’s strong
views on ‘Jesuits’ and the ‘Reds’, though makes no mention at all of

any hatred of Jews. Hitler certainly joined in talk about the Jews in
the Men’s Home. But his standpoint was, according to Hanisch’s
account, by no means negative. Hanisch has Hitler admiring the
Jews for their resistance to persecution, praising Heine’s poetry and
the music of Mendelssohn and Offenbach, expressing the view that
the Jews were the first civilized nation in that they had abandoned
polytheism for belief in one God, blaming Christians more than
Jews for usury, and dismissing the stock-in-trade antisemitic charge
of Jewish ritual murder as nonsense. Only Josef Greiner, of those
who claimed to have witnessed Hitler at first hand in the Men’s
Home, speaks of him as a fanatical Jew-hater in that period. But, as
we have noted, Greiner’s testimony is worthless.

There is, therefore, no reliable contemporary confirmation of
Hitler’s paranoid antisemitism during the Vienna period. If Hanisch
is to be believed, in fact, Hitler was not antisemitic at all at this
time. Beyond that, Hitler’s close comrades during the First World
War also recalled that he voiced no notable antisemitic views. The
question arises, then, whether Hitler had not invented his Viennese
‘conversion’ to antisemitism in Mein Kampf; whether, in fact, his
pathological hatred of the Jews only emerged in the wake of the
lost war, in 1918-19.

Why might Hitler fabricate the claim that he had become an
ideological antisemite in Vienna? And, equally, why might a
‘conversion’ at the end of the war be regarded as something to be
concealed by a story of an earlier transformation? The answer lies
in the image Hitler was establishing for himself in the early 1920s,
and particularly following the failed putsch of 1923 and his trial the
following spring. This demanded the self-portrait painted in Mein
Kampf, of the nobody who struggled from the first against
adversity, and, rejected by the academic ‘establishment’, taught
himself through painstaking study, coming — above all through his
own bitter experiences — to unique insights about society and
politics that enabled him without assistance to formulate at the age
of around twenty a rounded ‘world-view’. This unchanged ‘world-
view’, he was saying in 1924, provided him with the claim to

leadership of the national movement, and indeed with the claim to
be Germany’s coming ‘great leader’. Perhaps by then Hitler had
even convinced himself that all the pieces of the ideological jigsaw
had indeed fallen into place during his Vienna years. In any case, by
the early 1920s no one was in a position to gainsay the story. An
admission that he had become an ideological antisemite only at the
end of the war, as he lay blinded from mustard gas in a hospital in
Pasewalk and heard of Germany’s defeat and the revolution, would
certainly have sounded less heroic, and would also have smacked of
hysteria.

However, it is difficult to believe that Hitler of all people, given
the intensity of his hatred for the Jews between 1919 and the end of
his life, had remained unaffected by the poisonous antisemitic
atmosphere of the Vienna he knew - one of the most virulently anti-
Jewish cities in Europe. It was a city where, at the turn of the
century, radical antisemites advocated punishing sexual relations
between Jews and non-Jews as sodomy, and placing Jews under
surveillance around Easter to prevent ritual child-murder.
Schonerer, the racial antisemite, had notably helped to stir up the
hatred. Lueger was able to exploit the widespread and vicious
antisemitism to build up his Christian Social Party and consolidate
his hold on power in Vienna. Hitler greatly admired both. Once
more, it would have been strange had he of all people admired
them but been unaffected by such an essential stock-in-trade of their
message as their antisemitism. Certainly, he learnt from Lueger the
gains to be made from popularizing hatred against the Jews. The
explicitly antisemitic newspaper Hitler read, and singled out for
praise, the Deutsches Volksblatt, selling around 55,000 copies a day
at the time, described Jews as agents of decomposition and
corruption, and repeatedly linked them with sexual scandal,
perversion, and prostitution. Leaving aside the probably contrived
incident of the caftan-Jew, Hitler’s description of his gradual
exposure through the antisemitic gutter press to deep anti-Jewish
prejudice and its impact upon him while in Vienna has an authentic
ring about it.

Probably no single encounter produced his loathing for Jews.
Given his relations with his parents, there may have been some
connection with an unresolved Oedipal complex, though this is no
more than guesswork. Hitler’s linkage of Jews and prostitution has
prompted speculation that sexual fantasies, obsessions, or
perversions provide the key. Again, there is no reliable evidence.
The sexual connotations were no more than Hitler could have
picked up from the Deutsches Volksblatt. Another explanation would
be a simpler one. At the time that Hitler soaked up Viennese
antisemitism, he had recently experienced bereavement, failure,
rejection, isolation, and increasing penury. The gulf between his
self-image as a frustrated great artist or architect and the reality of
his life as a drop-out needed an explanation. The Viennese
antisemitic gutter press, it could be surmised, helped him to find
that explanation.

But if Hitler’s antisemitism was indeed formed in Vienna, why did
it remain unnoticed by those around him? The answer might well be
banal: in that hotbed of rabid antisemitism, anti-Jewish sentiment
was so commonplace that it could go practically unnoticed. The
argument from silence is, therefore, not conclusive. However, there
is still the evidence from Hanisch and the anonymous acquaintance
in the Men’s Home about Hitler’s friendship with Jews to contend
with. This seems to stand in flat contradiction to Hitler’s own lurid
account of his conversion to antisemitism in Vienna. One remark by
Hanisch, however, suggests that Hitler had indeed already
developed racist notions about the Jews. When one of their group
asked why Jews remained strangers in the nation, ‘Hitler answered
that it was because they were a different race.’ He added, according
to Hanisch, that ‘Jews had a different smell’. Hitler was said also to
have frequently remarked ‘that descendants of Jews are very radical
and have terroristic inclinations’. And when he and Neumann
discussed Zionism, Hitler said that any money of Jews leaving
Austria would obviously be confiscated ‘as it was not Jewish but
Austrian’. If Hanisch is to be believed, then, Hitler was advancing
views reflecting racial antisemitism at the same time that he was

closely associated with a number of Jews in the Men’s Home. Could
it have been that this very proximity, the dependence of the would-
be great artist on Jews to offload his little street paintings, at
precisely the same time that he was reading and digesting the
antisemitic bile poured out by Vienna’s gutter press, served only to
underline and deepen the bitter enmities taking shape in his mind?
Would the outsized ego of the unrecognized genius reduced to this
not have translated his self-disgust into inwardly fermenting race-
hatred when the plainly antisemitic Hanisch remarked to him that
‘he must be of Jewish blood, since such a large beard rarely grows
on a Christian chin’ and ‘he had big feet, as a desert wanderer must
have’? Whether Hitler was on terms of real friendship with the Jews
around him in the Men’s Home, as Hanisch states, might be
doubted. Throughout his life Hitler made remarkably few genuine
friendships. And throughout his life, despite the torrents of words
that poured from his mouth as a politician, he was adept at
camouflaging his true feelings even to those in his immediate
company. He was also a clever manipulator of those around him.
His relations with the Jews in the Men’s Home were clearly, at least
in part, self-serving. Robinson helped him out with money.
Neumann, too, paid off small debts for him. Loffner was Hitler’s go-
between with the dealers. Whatever his true feelings, in his contacts
with Jewish dealers and traders Hitler was simply being pragmatic:
as long as they could sell his paintings for him, he could swallow his
abstract dislike of Jews.

Though it has frequently been claimed, largely based on
Hanisch’s evidence and on the lack of reference to his antisemitic
views in the paltry sources available, that Hitler was not a racial
antisemite during his stay in Vienna, the balance of probabilities
surely suggests a different interpretation? It seems more likely that
Hitler, as he later claimed, indeed came to hate Jews during his
time in Vienna. But, probably, at this time it was still little more
than a rationalization of his personal circumstances rather than a
thought-out ‘world-view’. It was a personalized hatred — blaming
the Jews for all the ills that befell him in a city that he associated

with personal misery. But any expression of this hatred that he had
internalized did not stand out to those around him where
antisemitic vitriol was so normal. And, paradoxically, as long as he
needed Jews to help him earn what classed as a living, he kept quiet
about his true views and perhaps even on occasion, as Hanisch
indicates, insincerely made remarks which could be taken, if
mistakenly, as complimentary to Jewish culture. Only later, if this
line of argument is followed, did he rationalize his visceral hatred
into the fully-fledged ‘world-view’, with antisemitism as its core,
that congealed in the early 1920s. The formation of the ideological
antisemite had to wait until a further crucial phase in Hitler’s
development, ranging from the end of the war to his political
awakening in Munich in 1919.

That was all still in the future. In spring 1913, after three years in
the Men’s Home, Hitler was still drifting, vegetating — not any
longer down and out, it is true, and with responsibility to no one
but himself, but without any career prospects. He gave the
impression that he had still not given up all hope of studying art,
however, and told the writing-room regulars in the Men’s Home
that he intended to go to Munich to enter the Art Academy. He had
long said ‘he would go to Munich like a shot’, eulogizing about the
‘great picture galleries’ in the Bavarian capital. He had a good
reason for postponing any plans to leave for Munich. His share of
his father’s inheritance became due only on his twenty-fourth
birthday, on 20 April 1913. More than anything else, it might be
surmised, the wait for this money was what kept Hitler so long in
the city he detested. On 16 May 1913 the District Court in Linz
confirmed that he should receive the sizeable sum, with interest
added to the original 652 Kronen, of 819 Kronen 98 Heller, and that
this would be sent by post to the ‘artist’ Adolf Hitler in
Meldemannstrafge, Vienna. With this long-awaited and much-

welcome prize in his possession, he need delay his departure for
Munich no further.

He had another reason for deciding the time was ripe to leave
Vienna. In autumn 1909 he had failed to register for military
service, which he would have been due to serve the following
spring, after his twenty-first birthday. Even if found unfit, he would
still have been eligible in 1911 and 1912 to undertake military
service for a state he detested so fervently. Having avoided the
authorities for three years, he presumably felt it safe to cross the
border to Germany following his twenty-fourth birthday in 1913.
He was mistaken. The Austrian authorities had not overlooked him.
They were on his trail, and his avoidance of military service was to
cause him difficulties and embarrassment the following year. The
attempt to put any possible snoopers off the scent in later years is
why, once he had become well known, Hitler persistently dated his
departure from Vienna to 1912, not 1913.

On 24 May 1913, Hitler, carrying a light, black suitcase
containing all his possessions, in a better set of clothes than the
shabby suit he had been used to wearing, and accompanied by a
young, short-sighted, unemployed shop-assistant, Rudolf Hausler,
four years his junior, whom he had known for little over three
months in the Men’s Home, left the co-residents from the writing-
room who had escorted them a short distance, and set off for
Munich.

The Vienna years were over. They had indelibly marked Hitler’s
personality and the ‘basic stock of personal views’ he held. But these
‘personal opinions’ had not yet coagulated into a fully-fledged
ideology, or ‘world-view’. For that to happen, an even harder school
than Vienna had to be experienced: war and defeat. And only the
unique circumstances produced by that war and defeat enabled an
Austrian drop-out to find appeal in a different land, among the
people of his adopted country.

3
Elation and Embitterment

The First World War made Hitler possible. Without the experience
of war, the humiliation of defeat, and the upheaval of revolution
the failed artist and social drop-out would not have discovered what
to do with his life by entering politics and finding his métier as a
propagandist and beerhall demagogue. And without the trauma of
war, defeat, and revolution, without the political radicalization of
German society that this trauma brought about, the demagogue
would have been without an audience for his raucous, hate-filled
message. The legacy of the lost war provided the conditions in
which the paths of Hitler and the German people began to cross.
Without the war, a Hitler on the Chancellor’s seat that had been
occupied by Bismarck would have been unthinkable.

Looking back just over a decade later, Hitler spoke of the fifteen
months he spent in Munich before the war as ‘the happiest and by
far the most contented’ of his life. The fanatical German nationalist
exulted in his arrival in ‘a German city’, which he contrasted with
the ‘Babylon of races’ that, for him, had been Vienna. He gave a
number of reasons why he had left Vienna: bitter enmity towards
the Habsburg Empire for pro-Slav policies that were disadvantaging
the German population; growing hatred for the ‘foreign mixture of
peoples’ who were ‘corroding’ German culture in Vienna; the
conviction that Austria-Hungary was living on borrowed time, and
that its end could not come soon enough; and the intensified longing
to go to Germany, to where his ‘childhood secret desires and secret

love’ had drawn him. The last sentiments were plainly romanticized.
Otherwise, the feelings were genuine enough. And of his
determination not to fight for the Habsburg state there can be no
doubt. This is what Hitler meant when he said he left Austria
‘primarily for political reasons’. But the implication that he had left
as a form of political protest was disingenuous and deliberately
misleading. As we noted, the prime and immediate reason he
crossed the border into Germany was very tangible: the Linz
authorities were hot on his trail for evasion of military service.

Hitler wrote that he came to Munich in the hope of some day
making a name for himself as an architect. He described himself on
arrival as an ‘architectural painter’. In the letter he wrote to the
Linz authorities in 1914, defending himself against charges of
evading military service, he stated that he was forced to earn his
living as a self-employed artist in order to fund his training as an
architectural painter. In the biographical sketch he wrote in 1921,
he stated that he went to Munich as an ‘architecture-designer and
architecture-painter’. At his trial in February 1924 he implied that
he had already completed his training as an ‘architecture-designer’
by the time he came to Munich, but wanted to train to be a master
builder. Many years later he claimed his intention was to undertake
practical training in Germany; that on coming to Munich he had
hoped to study for three years before joining the major Munich
construction firm Heilmann and Littmann as a designer and then
showing, by entering the first architectural competition to design an
important building, just what he could do. None of these varying
and conflicting accounts was true. There is no evidence that Hitler
took any practical steps during his time in Munich to improve his
poor and dwindling career prospects. He was drifting no less
aimlessly than he had done in Vienna.

After arriving in Munich on 25 May 1913, a bright spring Sunday,
Hitler followed up an advertisement for a small room rented by the
family of the tailor Joseph Popp on the third floor of 34
SchleifSheimerstrafSe, in a poorish district to the north of the city,
on the edge of Schwabing, the pulsating centre of Munich’s artistic

and bohemian life, and not far from the big barracks area. His
travelling companion, Rudolf Hausler, shared the cramped room
with him until mid-February 1914. Apparently, Hitler’s habit of
reading late at night by the light of a petroleum lamp prevented
Hausler from sleeping, and so irritated him that he eventually
moved out, returning after a few days to take the room adjacent to
Hitler’s, where he stayed until May. According to his landlady, Frau
Popp, Hitler quickly set himself up with the equipment to begin
painting. As he had done in Vienna, he developed a routine where
he could complete a picture every two or three days, usually copied
from postcards of well-known tourist scenes in Munich — including
the Theatinerkirche, the Asamkirche, the Hofbrauhaus, the Alter
Hof, the Miinzhof, the Altes Rathaus, the Sendlinger Tor, the
Residenz, the Propylaen — then set out to find customers in bars,
cafés, and beerhalls. His accurate but uninspired, rather soulless
watercolours were, as Hitler himself later admitted when he was
German Chancellor and they were selling for massively inflated
prices, of very ordinary quality. But they were certainly no worse
than similar products touted about the beerhalls, often the work of
genuine art students seeking to pay their way. Once he had found
his feet, Hitler had no difficulty finding buyers. He was able to
make a modest living from his painting and exist about as
comfortably as he had done in his last years in Vienna. When the
Linz authorities caught up with him in 1914, he acknowledged that
his income — though irregular and fluctuating — could be put at
around 1,200 Marks a year, and told his court photographer
Heinrich Hoffmann at a much later date that he could get by on
around 80 Marks a month for living costs at that time.

As in Vienna, Hitler was polite but distant, self-contained,
withdrawn, and apparently without friends (other than, in the first
months, Hausler). Frau Popp could not recall Hitler having a single
visitor in the entire two years of his tenancy. He lived simply and
frugally, preparing his paintings during the day and reading at
night. According to Hitler’s own account, ‘the study of the political
events of the day’, especially foreign policy, preoccupied him during

his time in Munich. He also claimed to have immersed himself again
in the theoretical literature of Marxism and to have examined
thoroughly once more the relation of Marxism to the Jews. There is
no obvious reason to doubt his landlady’s witness to the books he
brought back with him from the Konigliche Hofund Staatsbibliothek
(Royal Court and State Library), not far away in Ludwigstrafse. In
all the millions of recorded words of Hitler, however, there is
nothing to indicate that he ever pored over the theoretical writings
of Marxism, that he had studied Marx, or Engels, or Lenin (who had
been in Munich not long before him), or Trotsky (his contemporary
in Vienna). Reading for Hitler, as in Vienna, was not for
enlightenment or learning, but to confirm prejudice.

Most of it was probably done in cafés, where Hitler could
continue his habit of devouring the newspapers available to
customers. This is where he kept abreast of political developments,
and where, at the slightest provocation, he could flare up and treat
anyone in proximity to his fiercely held views on whatever
preoccupied him at the time. Café and beerhall ‘discussions’ were
the nearest Hitler came in his Munich period to political
involvement. His statement in Mein Kampf that ‘in the years 1913
and 1914, I, for the first time in various circles which today in part
faithfully support the National Socialist movement, expressed the
conviction that the question of the future of the German nation was
the question of destroying Marxism’ elevates coffee-house
confrontation into the philosophy of the political prophet.

Hitler’s captive audiences in the cafés and beerhalls were for
most part the closest he came to human contact in his months in
Munich, and presumably offered some sort of outlet for his pent-up
prejudice and emotions. Contrary to his own depiction of the
Munich months as a time of further preparation for what fate would
eventually bring him, it was in reality an empty, lonely, and futile
period for him. He was in love with Munich; but Munich was not in
love with him. And as regards his own future, he had no more idea
where he was going than he had done during his years in the Vienna
Men’s Home.

He very nearly ended up in an Austrian prison. Already in August
1913 the Linz police had started inquiries about Hitler’s
whereabouts because of his failure to register for military service.
Evasion of military service was punishable by a hefty fine. And
leaving Austria to avoid it was treated as desertion and carried a jail
sentence. By way of his relatives in Linz, the Viennese police, and
the Men’s Home in Meldemannstrafse, the trail eventually led to
Munich, where the police were able to inform their Linz
counterparts that Hitler had been registered since 26 May 1913 as
living with the Popps at 34 SchleifSsheimerstraf{e. Hitler was shaken
to the core when an officer of the Munich criminal police turned up
on Frau Popp’s doorstep on the afternoon of Sunday, 18 January
1914 with a summons for him to appear two days later in Linz
under pain of fine and imprisonment to register for military service,
and promptly took him under arrest prior to handing him over to
the Austrian authorities. The Munich police had for some reason
delayed delivery of the summons for several days before the
Sunday, leaving Hitler as a consequence extremely short notice to
comply with its demand to be in Linz by the Tuesday. That,
together with Hitler’s run-down appearance, lack of ready money,
apologetic demeanour, and somewhat pathetic explanation
influenced the Austrian consulate in Munich to look with some
sympathy on his position. He impressed the consular officials, who
thought him ‘worthy of consideration’, and the Linz magistracy now
granted him permission to appear, as he had requested, on 5
February, in Salzburg instead of Linz. No fine or imprisonment was
imposed; his travel expenses were paid by the consulate. And, in the
event, on duly attending at Salzburg he was found to be too weak to
undertake military service.

Hitler returned to his mundane life as a small-time artist; but not
for long. The storm-clouds were gathering over Europe. On Sunday,
28 June 1914, the sensational news broke of the assassination in
Sarajevo of the heir to the Austrian throne, Archduke Franz
Ferdinand, and his wife. Germany, like other countries in Europe,

became gripped by war fever. By the beginning of August, the
Continent was at war.

For Hitler, the war was a godsend. Since his failure in the Art
Academy in 1907, he had vegetated, resigned to the fact that he
would not become a great artist, now cherishing a pipe-dream that
he would somehow become a notable architect — though with no
plans for or realistic hope of fulfilling this ambition. Seven years
after that failure, the ‘nobody of Vienna’, now in Munich, remained
a drop-out and nonentity, futilely angry at a world which had
rejected him. He was still without any career prospects, without
qualifications or any expectation of gaining them, without any
capacity for forging close and lasting friendships, and without real
hope of coming to terms with himself — or with a society he
despised for his own failure. The war offered him his way out. At
the age of twenty-five, it gave him for the first time in his life a
cause, a commitment, comradeship, an external discipline, a sort of
regular employment, a sense of well-being, and — more than that - a
sense of belonging. His regiment became home for him. When he
was wounded in 1916 his first words to his superior officer were:
‘It’s not so bad, Herr Oberleutnant, eh? I can stay with you, stay
with the regiment.’ Later in the war, the prospect of leaving the
regiment may well have influenced his wish not to be considered for
promotion. And at the end of the war, he had good practical reasons
for staying in the army as long as possible: the army had by then
been his ‘career’ for four years, and he had no other job to go back
to or look forward to. The war and its aftermath made Hitler. After
Vienna, it was the second formative period in decisively shaping his
personality.

At the beginning of August 1914, Hitler was among the tens of
thousands in Munich in the thrall of emotional delirium,
passionately enthused by the prospect of war. As for so many
others, his elation would later turn to deep embitterment. With

Hitler, the emotional pendulum set moving by the onset of war
swung more violently than for most. ‘Overpowered by stormy
enthusiasm,’ he wrote, ‘I fell down on my knees and thanked
Heaven from an overflowing heart for granting me the good fortune
of being permitted to live at this time.’ That on this occasion his
words were true cannot be doubted. Years later, noticing a
photograph taken by Heinrich Hoffmann (who was to become his
court photographer) of the huge patriotic demonstration in front of
the Feldherrnhalle on Munich’s Odeonsplatz on 2 August 1914, the
day after the German declaration of war on Russia, Hitler pointed
out that he had been among the emotional crowd that day, carried
away with nationalist fervour, hoarse with singing ‘Die Wacht am
Rhein’ and ‘Deutschland, Deutschland iiber alles’. Hoffmann
immediately set to work on enlargements, and discovered the face
of the twenty-five-year-old Hitler in the centre of the photograph,
gripped and enraptured by the war hysteria. The subsequent mass
reproduction of the photograph helped contribute to the
establishment of the Fuhrer myth — and to Hoffmann’s immense
profits.

It was doubtless under the impact of the same elation swaying
tens of thousands of young men in Munich and many other cities in
Europe during those days to rush to join up that, according to his
own account, on 3 August, immediately following the
Feldherrnhalle demonstration, Hitler submitted a personal petition
to King Ludwig III of Bavaria to serve as an Austrian in the Bavarian
army. The granting of his request by the cabinet office, he went on,
arrived, to his unbounded joy, the very next day. Though this
version has been accepted in most accounts, it is scarcely credible.
In the confusion of those days, it would have required truly
remarkable bureaucratic efficiency for Hitler’s request to have been
approved overnight. In any case, not the cabinet office but the war
ministry was alone empowered to accept foreigners (including
Austrians) as volunteers. In reality, Hitler owed his service in the
Bavarian army not to bureaucratic efficiency, but to bureaucratic
oversight. Detailed inquiries carried out by the Bavarian authorities

in 1924 were unable to clarify precisely how, instead of being
returned to Austria in August 1914 as should have happened, he
came to serve in the Bavarian army. It was presumed that he was
among the flood of volunteers who rushed to their nearest place of
recruitment in the first days of August, leading, the report added, to
not unnatural inconsistencies and breaches of the strict letter of the
law. ‘In all probability,’ commented the report, ‘the question of
Hitler’s nationality was never even raised.’ Hitler, it was concluded,
almost certainly entered the Bavarian army by error.

Probably, as Hitler wrote in a brief autobiographical sketch in
1921, he volunteered on 5 August 1914 for service in the First
Bavarian Infantry Regiment. Like many others in these first chaotic
days, he was initially sent away again since there was no immediate
use for him. On 16 August he was summoned to report at Recruiting
Depot VI in Munich for kitting out by the Second Reserve Battalion
of the Second Infantry Regiment. By the beginning of September he
had been assigned to the newly formed Bavarian Reserve Infantry
Regiment 16 (known from the name of its first commander as the
‘List Regiment’), largely comprising raw recruits. After a few weeks
of hurried training, they were ready for the front. In the early hours
of 21 October, the troop train carrying Hitler left for the battlefields
of Flanders.

On 29 October, within six days of arriving in Lille, Hitler’s
battalion had its baptism of fire on the Menin Road near Ypres. In
letters from the front to Joseph Popp and to a Munich acquaintance,
Ernst Hepp, Hitler wrote that after four days of fighting, the List
Regiment’s fighting force had been reduced from 3,600 to 611 men.
The initial losses were indeed a staggering 70 per cent. Hitler’s
initial idealism, he said later, gave way on seeing the thousands
killed and injured, to the realization ‘that life is a constant horrible
struggle’. From now on, death was a daily companion. It immunized
him completely against any sensitivity to human suffering. Even
more than in the Viennese doss-house, he closed his eyes to sorrow
and pity. Struggle, survival, victory: these were all that counted.

On 3 November 1914 (with effect from 1 November), Hitler was
promoted to corporal. It was his last promotion of the war, though
he could certainly have been expected to advance further, as least as
far as non-commissioned officer (Unteroffizier). Later in the war, he
was in fact nominated for promotion by Max Amann, then a staff
sergeant, subsequently Hitler’s press baron, and the regimental staff
considered making him Unteroffizier. Fritz Wiedemann, the
regimental adjutant who in the 1930s became for a time one of the
Fuhrer’s adjutants, testified after the end of the Third Reich that
Hitler’s superiors had thought him lacking in leadership qualities.
However, both Amann and Wiedemann made clear that Hitler,
probably because he would have been then transferred from the
regimental staff, actually refused to be considered for promotion.

Hitler had been assigned on 9 November to the regimental staff
as an orderly — one of a group of eight to ten dispatch runners,
whose task was to carry orders, on foot or sometimes by bicycle,
from the regimental command post to the battalion and company
leaders at the front, three kilometres away. Strikingly, in his Mein
Kampf account, Hitler omitted to mention that he was a dispatch
runner, implying that he actually spent the war in the trenches. But
the attempts of his political enemies in the early 1930s to belittle
the dangers involved in the duties of the dispatch runner and decry
Hitler’s war service, accusing him of shirking and cowardice, were
misplaced. When, as was not uncommon, the front was relatively
quiet, there were certainly times when the dispatch runners could
laze around at staff headquarters, where conditions were greatly
better than in the trenches. It was in such conditions at regimental
headquarters in Fournes en Weppes, near Fromelles in northern
France, where Hitler spent nearly half of his wartime service, that
he could find the time to paint pictures and read (if his own account
can be believed) the works of Schopenhauer that he claimed he
carried around with him. Even so, the dangers faced by the dispatch
runners during battles, carrying messages to the front through the
firing line, were real enough. The losses among dispatch runners
were relatively high. If at all possible, two runners would be sent

with a message to ensure that it would get through if one happened
to be killed. Three of the eight runners attached to the regimental
staff were killed and another one wounded in a confrontation with
French troops on 15 November. Hitler himself — not for the only
time in his life — had luck on his side two days later when a French
shell exploded in the regimental forward command post minutes
after he had gone out, leaving almost the entire staff there dead or
wounded. Among the seriously wounded was the regimental
commander Oberstleutnant Philipp Engelhardt, who had been about
to propose Hitler for the Iron Cross for his part, assisted by a
colleague, in protecting the commander’s life under fire a few days
earlier. On 2 December, Hitler was finally presented with the Iron
Cross, Second Class, one of four dispatch runners among the sixty
men from his regiment to receive the honour. It was, he said, ‘the
happiest day of my life’.

From all indications, Hitler was a committed, rather than simply
conscientious and dutiful, soldier, and did not lack physical courage.
His superiors held him in high regard. His immediate comrades,
mainly the group of dispatch runners, respected him and, it seems,
even quite liked him, though he could also plainly irritate as well as
puzzle them. His lack of a sense of fun made him an easy target for
good-natured ribbing. ‘What about looking around for a Mamsell?’
suggested a telephonist one day. ‘I’d die of shame looking for sex
with a French girl,’ interjected Hitler, to a burst of laughter from
the others. ‘Look at the monk,’ one said. Hitler’s retort was: ‘Have
you no German sense of honour left at all?’ Though his quirkiness
singled him out from the rest of his group, Hitler’s relations with his
immediate comrades were generally good. Most of them later
became members of the NSDAP, and, when, as usually happened,
they reminded Reich Chancellor Hitler of the time that they had
been his comrades in arms, he made sure they were catered for with
cash donations and positions as minor functionaries. For all that
they got on well with him, they thought ‘Adi’, as they called him,
was distinctly odd. They referred to him as ‘the artist’ and were
struck by the fact that he received no mail or parcels (even at

Christmas) after about mid-1915, never spoke of family or friends,
neither smoked nor drank, showed no interest in visits to brothels,
and used to sit for hours in a corner of the dug-out, brooding or
reading. Photographs of him during the war show a thin, gaunt face
dominated by a thick, dark, bushy moustache. He was usually on
the edge of his group, expressionless where others were smiling.
One of his closest comrades, Balthasar Brandmayer, a stonemason
from Bruckmiuhl in the Bad Aibling district of Upper Bavaria, later
described his first impressions of Hitler at the end of May 1915:
almost skeletal in appearance, dark eyes hooded in a sallow
complexion, untrimmed moustache, sitting in a corner buried in a
newspaper, occasionally taking a sip of tea, seldom joining in the
banter of the group. He seemed an oddity, shaking his head
disapprovingly at silly, light-hearted remarks, not even joining in
the usual soldiers’ moans, gripes, and jibes. ‘Haven’t you ever loved
a girl?’ Brandmayer asked Hitler. ‘Look, Brandmoiri,’ was the
straight-faced reply, ‘I’ve never had time for anything like that, and
I'll never get round to it.’ His only real affection seems to have been
for his dog, Foxl, a white terrier that had strayed across from
enemy lines. Hitler taught it tricks, revelling in how attached it was
to him and how glad it was to see him when he returned from duty.
He was distraught late in the war when his unit had to move on and
Foxl could not be found. ‘The swine who took him from me doesn’t
know what he did to me,’ was his comment many years later. He
felt as strongly about none of the thousands of humans he saw
slaughtered about him.

About the war itself, Hitler was utterly fanatical. No
humanitarian feelings could be allowed to interfere with the
ruthless prosecution of German interests. He vehemently
disapproved of the spontaneous gestures of friendship at Christmas
1914, when German and British troops met in no man’s land,
shaking hands and singing carols together. ‘There should be no
question of something like that during war,’ he protested. His
comrades knew that they could always provoke Hitler with defeatist
comments, real or contrived. All they had to do was to claim the

war would be lost and Hitler would go off at the deep end. ‘For us
the war can’t be lost’ were invariably his last words. The lengthy
letter he sent on 5 February 1915 to his Munich acquaintance,
Assessor Ernst Hepp, concluded with an insight into his view of the
war redolent of the prejudices that had been consuming him since
his Vienna days:

Each of us has only one wish, that it may soon come to the final reckoning with the gang,
to the showdown, cost what it will, and that those of us who have the fortune to see their
homeland again will find it purer and cleansed of alien influence (Fremdldnderei), that
through the sacrifices and suffering that so many hundred thousand of us make daily, that
through the stream of blood that flows here day for day against an international world of
enemies, not only will Germany’s external enemies be smashed, but that our inner
internationalism will also be broken. That would be worth more to me than all territorial
gains.

This was how he saw the colossal slaughter; not in terms of
human suffering, but as worthwhile for the making of a better,
racially cleansed, Germany. Hitler evidently carried such deep-
seated sentiments throughout the war. But this political outburst,
tagged on to a long description of military events and wartime
conditions, was unusual. He appears to have spoken little to his
comrades on political matters. Perhaps the fact that his comrades
thought him peculiar hindered him from giving voice to his strong
opinions. He appears, too, to have scarcely mentioned the Jews.
Several former comrades claimed after 1945 that Hitler had at most
made a few off-hand though commonplace comments about the
Jews in those years, but that they had no inkling then of the
unbounded hatred that was so visible after 1918. Balthasar
Brandmayer recalled on the other hand in his reminiscences, first
published in 1932, that during the war he had ‘often not understood
Adolf Hitler when he called the Jew the wire-puller behind all
misfortune’. According to Brandmayer, Hitler became more
politically involved in the latter years of the war and made no
secret of his feelings on what he saw as the Social Democrat
instigators of growing unrest in Germany. Such comments, like all
sources that postdate Hitler’s rise to prominence and, as in this case,
glorify the prescience of the future leader, have to be treated with

caution. But it is difficult to dismiss them out of hand. It indeed
does seem very likely, as his own account in Mein Kampf claims,
that Hitler’s political prejudices sharpened in the latter part of the
war, during and after his first period of leave in Germany in 1916.

Between March 1915 and September 1916, the List Regiment
fought in the trenches near Fromelles, defending a two-kilometre
stretch of the stalemated front. Heavy battles with the British were
fought in May 1915 and July 1916, but in one and a half years, the
front barely moved a few metres. On 27 September 1916, two
months after heavy fighting in the second battle of Fromelles, when
a British offensive was staved off with difficulty, the regiment
moved southwards and by 2 October was engaged on the Somme.
Within days, Hitler was wounded in the left thigh when a shell
exploded in the dispatch runners’ dug-out, killing and wounding
several of them. After treatment in a field hospital, he spent almost
two months, from 9 October until 1 December 1916, in the Red
Cross hospital at Beelitz, near Berlin. He had not been in Germany
for two years. He soon noticed how different the mood was from
the heady days of August 1914. He was appalled to hear men in the
hospital bragging about their malingering or how they had managed
to inflict minor injuries on themselves to make sure they could
escape from the front. He encountered much the same low morale
and widespread discontent in Berlin during the period of his
recuperation. It was his first time in the city, and allowed him to
pay a visit to the Nationalgalerie. But Munich shocked him most of
all. He scarcely recognized the city: ‘Anger, discontent, cursing,
wherever you went!’ Morale was poor; people were dispirited;
conditions were miserable; and, as was traditional in Bavaria, the
blame was placed on the Prussians. Hitler himself, according to his
own account written about eight years later, saw in all this only the
work of the Jews. He was struck too, so he said, by the number of
Jews in clerical positions — ‘nearly every clerk was a Jew and nearly
every Jew was a clerk’ — compared with how few of them were
serving at the front. (In fact, this was a base calumny: there was as
good as no difference between the proportion of Jews and non-Jews

in the German army, relative to their numbers in the total
population, and many Jews served — some in the List Regiment —
with great distinction.) There is no reason to presume, as has
sometimes been the case, that this account of his anti-Jewish
feelings in 1916 was a backwards projection of feelings that in
reality only existed from 1918-19 onwards. Though, as we have
noted, Hitler did not stand out for his antisemitism in the
recollections of some of his former wartime comrades, two of them
did refer to his negative comments about the Jews. And Hitler
would have been voicing sentiments that were increasingly to be
heard in the streets of Munich as anti-Jewish prejudice became
more widespread and more ferocious in the second half of the war.

Hitler wanted to get back to the front as soon as possible, and
above all to rejoin his old regiment. He eventually returned to it on
5 March 1917 in its new position a few miles to the north of Vimy.
In the summer it was back to the same ground near Ypres that the
regiment had fought over almost three years earlier, to counter the
major Flanders offensive launched by the British in mid-July 1917.
Battered by the heavy fighting, the regiment was relieved at the
beginning of August and transported to Alsace. At the end of
September, Hitler took normal leave for the first time. He had no
wish to go back to Munich, which had dispirited him so much, and
went to Berlin instead, to stay with the parents of one of his
comrades. His postcards to friends in the regiment spoke of how
much he enjoyed his eighteen-day leave, and how thrilled he was by
Berlin and its museums. In mid-October, he returned to his
regiment, which had just moved from Alsace to Champagne. Bitter
fighting in April 1918 brought huge losses, and during the last two
weeks of July the regiment was involved in the second battle of the
Marne. It was the last major German offensive of the war. By early
August, when it collapsed in the face of a tenacious Allied counter-
offensive, German losses in the previous four months of savage
combat had amounted to around 800,000 men. The failure of the
offensive marked the point where, with reserves depleted and

morale plummeting, Germany’s military leadership was compelled
to recognize that the war was lost.

On 4 August 1918, Hitler received the Iron Cross, First Class - a
rare achievement for a corporal — from the regimental commander,
Major von Tubeuf. By a stroke of irony, he had a Jewish officer,
Leutnant Hugo Gutmann, to thank for the nomination. The story
was later to be found in all school books that the Ftthrer had
received the EK I for single-handedly capturing fifteen French
soldiers. The truth, as usual, was somewhat more prosaic. From the
available evidence, including the recommendation of the List
Regiment’s Deputy Commander Freiherr von Godin on 31 July
1918, the award was made - as it was also to a fellow dispatch
runner — for bravery shown in delivering an important dispatch,
following a breakdown in telephone communications, from
command headquarters to the front through heavy fire. Gutmann,
from what he subsequently said, had promised both dispatch
runners the EK I if they succeeded in delivering the message. But
since the action was, though certainly courageous, not strikingly
exceptional, it was only after several weeks of his belabouring the
divisional commander that permission for the award was granted.

By mid-August 1918, the List Regiment had moved to Cambrai to
help combat a British offensive near Bapaume, and a month later
was back in action once more in the vicinity of Wytschaete and
Messines, where Hitler had received his EK II almost four years
earlier. This time Hitler was away from the battlefields. In late
August he had been sent for a week to Nuremberg for telephone
communications training, and on 10 September he began his second
period of eighteen days’ leave, again in Berlin. Immediately on his
return, at the end of September, his unit was put under pressure
from British assaults near Comines. Gas was now in extensive use in
offensives, and protection against it was minimal and primitive. The
List Regiment, like others, suffered badly. On the night of 13-14
October, Hitler himself fell victim to mustard gas on the heights
south of Wervick, part of the southern front near Ypres. He and
several comrades, retreating from their dug-out during a gas attack,

were partially blinded by the gas and found their way to safety only
by clinging on to each other and following a comrade who was
slightly less badly afflicted. After initial treatment in Flanders,
Hitler was transported on 21 October 1918 to the military hospital
in Pasewalk, near Stettin, in Pomerania.

The war was over for him. And, little though he knew it, the
Army High Command was already manoeuvring to extricate itself
from blame for a war it accepted was lost and a peace which would
soon have to be negotiated. It was in Pasewalk, recovering from his
temporary blindness, that Hitler was to learn the shattering news of
defeat and revolution — what he called ‘the greatest villainy of the
century’.

Ill

In reality, of course, there had been no treachery, no stab-in-the-
back. This was pure invention of the Right, a legend the Nazis
would use as a central element of their propaganda armoury. Unrest
at home was a consequence, not a cause, of military failure.
Germany had been militarily defeated and was close to the end of
its tether — though nothing had prepared people for capitulation. In
fact, triumphalist propaganda was still coming from the High
Command in late October 1918. The army was by then exhausted,
and in the previous four months had suffered heavier losses than at
any time during the war. Desertions and ‘shirking’ — deliberately
ducking duty (estimated at close on a million men in the last
months of the war) — rose dramatically. At home, the mood was one
of mounting protest — embittered, angry, and increasingly
rebellious. The revolution was not fabricated by Bolshevik
sympathizers and unpatriotic troublemakers, but grew out of the
profound disillusionment and rising unrest which had set in even as
early as 1915 and from 1916 onwards had flowed into what finally
became a torrent of disaffection. The society which had seemingly
entered the war in total patriotic unity ended it completely riven —
and traumatized by the experience.

Amid the social division, there were certain common targets of
aggression. War profiteering — a theme on which Hitler was able to
play so effectively in the Munich beerhalls in 1920 — rankled deeply.
Closely related was the bitter resentment at those running the black
market. Petty officialdom, with its unremitting and intensified
bureaucratic intervention into every sphere of daily life, was a
further target. But the fury did not confine itself to the interference
and incompetence of petty bureaucrats. These were merely the face
of a state whose authority was crumbling visibly, a state in terminal
disarray and disintegration.

Not least, in the search for scapegoats, Jews increasingly became
the focus of intensified hatred and aggression from the middle of
the war onwards. The sentiments had all been heard before. What
was new was the extent to which radical antisemitism was now
being propagated, and the degree to which it was evidently falling
on fertile ground. Heinrich Clafs, the leader of the arch-nationalist
Pan-Germans, could report in October 1917 that antisemitism had
‘already reached enormous proportions’ and that ‘the struggle for
survival was now beginning for the Jews’. Events in Russia in 1917
further stirred the pot of simmering hatred, adding the vital
ingredient — to become thereafter the keystone of antisemitic
agitation — of the Jews portrayed as running secret international
organizations directed at fomenting world revolution. As it was
realized that the war was lost, antisemitic hysteria, whipped up by
the Pan-Germanists, reached fever pitch. Clafg used the notorious
words of Heinrich von Kleist, aimed at the French in 1813, when a
‘Jewish Committee’ with the purpose of ‘exploiting the situation to
sound the clarion call against Judaism and to use the Jews as
lightning rods for all injustices’ was set up by the Pan-Germans in
September 1918: ‘Kill them; the world court is not asking you for
your reasons!’

The atmosphere of disintegration and collapsing morale, the climate
of political and ideological radicalization, in the last two war years
could not but make the deepest impression on a Hitler who had
welcomed the war so rapturously, had supported German aims so
fanatically, and had from the outset condemned all defeatist
suggestions so vehemently. He was repelled by many attitudes he
encountered at the front. But, as we have seen, it was during the
three periods, amounting in total to over three months, that he
spent in Germany either on leave or recovering from injury in the
last two war years that he experienced a level of disaffection at the
running of the war which was new and deeply appalling to him. He
had been shocked at the atmosphere in Berlin and, even more so,
Munich in 1916. As the war dragged on, he became incensed by the
talk of revolution, and incandescent at news of the munitions strike
in favour of early peace without annexations which had spread
briefly at the end of January 1918 from Berlin to other major
industrial cities (though with little actual effect on munitions
supplies).

The last two years of the war, between his convalescence in
Beelitz in October 1916 and his hospitalization in Pasewalk in
October 1918, can probably be seen as a vital staging-post in
Hitler’s ideological development. The prejudices and phobias carried
over from the Vienna years were now plainly evident in his
embittered rage about the collapse of the war effort — the first cause
in his life to which he had totally bound himself, the summation of
all that he had believed in. But they had not yet been fully
rationalized into the component parts of a political ideology. That
would only emerge fully during Hitler’s own ‘political training’ in
the Reichswehr in the course of 1919.

What part the hospitalization in Pasewalk played in the shaping
of Hitler’s ideology, what significance it had for the shaping of the
future party leader and dictator, has been much disputed and, in
truth, is not easy to evaluate. In Hitler’s own account it has a
pivotal place. Recovering from his temporary blindness, but unable
to read newspapers, so he wrote, Hitler heard rumours of pending

revolution but did not fully comprehend them. The arrival of some
mutineering sailors was the first tangible sign of serious
disturbance, but Hitler and fellow-patients from Bavaria presumed
the unrest would be crushed within a few days. However, it became
soon clear — ‘the most terrible certainty of my life’ - that a general
revolution had taken place. On 10 November, a pastor addressed
the patients in sorrowful terms about the end of the monarchy and
informed them that Germany was now a republic, that the war was
lost and that Germans had to place themselves at the mercy of the
victors. At this, Hitler later wrote:

I could stand it no longer. It became impossible for me to sit still one minute more. Again
everything went black before my eyes; I tottered and groped my way back to the dormitory,
threw myself on my bunk, and dug my burning head into my blanket and pillow.

Since the day when I had stood at my mother’s grave, I had not wept ... But now I could
not help it ...

And so it had all been in vain ... Did all this happen only so that a gang of wretched
criminals could lay hands on the fatherland? ...

The more I tried to achieve clarity on the monstrous event in this hour, the more the
shame of indignation and disgrace burned my brow. What was all the pain in my eyes
compared to this misery?

There followed terrible days and even worse nights — I knew that all was lost ... In these
nights hatred grew in me, hatred for those responsible for this deed.

In the days that followed, my own fate became known to me.

I could not help but laugh at the thought of my own future which only a short time
before had given me such bitter concern ...

He drew, according to his own account, the conclusion that: “There
is no making pacts with Jews; there can only be the hard: either-or.
And he made the decision that changed his life: ‘I, for my part,
decided to go into politics.’

Hitler referred to his Pasewalk experience on a number of
occasions in the early 1920s, sometimes even with embellishments.
Some have been tempted to read into Hitler’s colourful accounts an
hallucination which holds the key to his manic ideological
obsessions, his ‘mission’ to save Germany, and his rapport with a
German people themselves traumatized by defeat and national
humiliation. The balance of probabilities suggests a less dramatic
process of ideological development and political awareness.

Without question, Hitler was more than just deeply outraged by
the news of the revolution. He felt it to be an absolute and
unpardonable betrayal of all that he believed in, and, in pain,
discomfort, and bitterness, looked for the culprits who would
provide him with an explanation of how his world had collapsed.
There is no need to doubt that for Hitler these intensely disturbing
few days did amount to no less than a traumatic experience. From
the following year onwards, his entire political activity was driven
by the trauma of 1918 — aimed at expunging the defeat and
revolution which had betrayed all that he had believed in, and
eliminating those he held responsible.

But if there is any strength in the suggestion we have put forward
that Hitler acquired his deep-seated prejudices, including his
antisemitism, in Vienna, and had them revitalized during the last
two war years, if without rationalizing them into a composite
ideology, then there is no need to mystify the Pasewalk experience
through seeing it as a sudden, dramatic conversion to paranoid
antisemitism. Rather, Pasewalk might be viewed as the time when,
as Hitler lay tormented and seeking an explanation of how his
world had been shattered, his own rationalization started to fall into
place. Devastated by the events unfolding in Munich, Berlin, and
other cities, he must have read into them outright confirmation of
the views he had always held from the Vienna days on Jews and
Social Democrats, on Marxism and internationalism, on pacifism and
democracy. Even so, it was still only the beginning of the
rationalization. The full fusion of his antisemitism and anti-Marxism
was yet to come. There is no authentic evidence that Hitler, up to
and including this point, had said a word about Bolshevism. Nor
would he do so, even in his early public speeches in Munich, before
1920. The connection of Bolshevism with his internal hate-figures,
its incorporation into and adoption of a central place in his ‘world-
view’, came only during his time in the Reichswehr in the summer
of 1919. And later still came the preoccupation with ‘living space’ —
only emerging into a dominant theme during the composition of
Mein Kampf between 1924 and 1926. Pasewalk was a crucial step on

the way to Hitler’s rationalization of his prejudices. But even more
important, in all probability, was the time he spent in the
Reichswehr in 1919.

The last implausible point of Hitler’s Pasewalk story is that he
resolved there and then to enter politics. In none of his speeches
before the putsch in November 1923 did Hitler say a word about
deciding in autumn 1918 to enter politics. In fact, Hitler was in no
position in Pasewalk to ‘decide’ to enter politics — or anything else.
The end of the war meant that, like most other soldiers, he faced
demobilization. The army had been his home for four years. But
now once more his future was uncertain.

When he left Pasewalk on 19 November 1918 to return, via
Berlin, to Munich, he had savings totalling only 15 Marks 30
Pfennige in his Munich account. No career awaited him. Nor did he
make any effort to enter politics. Indeed, it is not easy to see how
he could have done so. Neither family nor ‘connections’ were
available to gain him some minor patronage in a political party. A
‘decision’ to enter politics, should Hitler have made one in
Pasewalk, would have been empty of meaning. Only staying in the
army offered him the hope of avoiding the evil day when he would
once more have to face up to the fact that, four turbulent years on,
he was no nearer his chosen career as an architect than he had been
in 1914, and was without any prospects whatsoever. The future
looked bleak. A return to the lonely existence of the pre-war small-
time painter had no appeal. But little else beckoned. The army gave
him his chance. He was able to stave off demobilization longer than
almost all his former comrades, and to keep on the payroll, until 31
March 1920.

It was in the army in 1919 that his ideology finally took shape.
Above all, the army, in the extraordinary circumstances of 1919,
turned Hitler into a propagandist — the most talented demagogue of
his day. Not a deliberate choice, but making the most of the
conditions in which he found himself, provided Hitler with his entry
into politics. Opportunism — and a good slice of luck - were more
instrumental than strength of will.

4
The Beerhall Agitator

On 21 November 1918, two days after leaving hospital in Pasewalk,
Hitler was back in Munich. Approaching thirty years of age, without
education, career, or prospects, his only plans were to stay in the
army, which had been his home and provided for him since 1914, as
long as possible. He came back to a Munich he scarcely recognized.
The barracks to which he returned were run by soldiers’ councils.
The revolutionary Bavarian government, in the shape of a
provisional National Council, was in the hands of the Social
Democrats and the more radical Independent Social Democrats (the
USPD). The Minister President, Kurt Eisner, was a radical; and he
was a Jew.

The revolution in Bavaria had preceded that in the Reich itself. It
took place in circumstances and developed in ways that were to
leave a profound mark on Hitler, and to fit more than the events in
Berlin into what became the Nazi caricature of the 1918 revolution.
It was more radical, with the leadership in the hands of the
Independents; it degenerated into near-anarchy, then into a short-
lived attempt to create a Communist-run Soviet-style system; this in
turn led to a few days — though a few days which seared the
consciousness of Bavarians for many years to come — that amounted
to a mini-civil war, ending in bloodshed and brutality; and a number
of the revolutionary leaders happened to be Jewish, some of them
east European Jews with Bolshevik sympathies and connections.
Moreover, the leader of the Bavarian revolution, the Jewish
journalist and left-wing socialist Kurt Eisner, a prominent peace-
campaigner in the USPD since the split with the Majority Social

Democrats in 1917, together with some of his USPD colleagues, had
unquestionably tried to stir up industrial unrest during the ‘January
Strike’ in 1918, and had been arrested for his actions. That was to
fit nicely into the Right’s ‘stab-in-the-back’ legend.

The provisional government that was soon constituted under
Eisner’s leadership was from the outset a highly unstable coalition,
mainly composed of the radical but largely idealistic USPD and the
‘moderate’ SPD (which had not even wanted a revolution).
Moreover, it stood no chance of mastering the daunting social and
economic problems it faced. The assassination of Eisner by a young,
aristocratic former officer, currently a student at Munich University,
Graf Anton von Arco-Valley, on 21 February 1919, provided then
the signal for a deterioration into chaos and near-anarchy. Members
of the USPD and anarchists proclaimed a ‘Councils Republic’ in
Bavaria. The initial failure of attempts at counter-revolution simply
strengthened the resolve of the revolutionary hotheads and ushered
in the last phase of the Bavarian revolution: the full Communist
takeover in the second, or ‘real’ Raterepublik — an attempt to
introduce a Soviet-style system in Bavaria. It lasted little more than
a fortnight. But it ended in violence, bloodshed, and deep
recrimination, imposing a baleful legacy on the political climate of
Bavaria.

It would be hard to exaggerate the impact on political
consciousness in Bavaria of the events between November 1918 and
May 1919, and quite especially of the Raterepublik. At its very
mildest, it was experienced in Munich itself as a time of curtailed
freedom, severe food shortages, press censorship, general strike,
sequestration of foodstuffs, coal, and items of clothing, and general
disorder and chaos. But, of more lasting significance, it went down
in popular memory as a ‘rule of horror’ imposed by foreign
elements in the service of Soviet Communism. The image,
constructed and massively shored up by rightist propaganda
throughout the Reich as well as in Bavaria itself, was that of alien —
Bolshevik and Jewish — forces taking over the state, threatening
institutions, traditions, order, and property, presiding over chaos

and mayhem, perpetrating terrible acts of violence, and causing
anarchy of advantage only to Germany’s enemies. The real gainers
from the disastrous weeks of the Raterepublik were the radical
Right, which had been given the fuel to stoke the fear and hatred of
Bolshevism among the Bavarian peasantry and middle classes. Not
least, extreme counter-revolutionary violence had come to be
accepted as a legitimate response to the perceived Bolshevik threat
and now became a regular feature of the political scene.

Its flirt with left-wing socialism over, Bavaria turned in the
following years into a bastion of the conservative Right and a
magnet for right-wing extremists throughout Germany. These were
the conditions in which the ‘making of Adolf Hitler’ could take
place.

The history of the Bavarian revolution was almost tailor-made for
Nazi propaganda. Not just the legend of the ‘stab-in-the-back’, but
the notion of an international Jewish conspiracy could be made to
sound plausible in the light of the Munich Raterepublik. Though
right-wing extremism had no stronger traditions in Bavaria than
elsewhere up to this point, the new climate provided it with unique
opportunities and the favour of a sympathetic establishment. Many
of Hitler’s early followers were deeply influenced by the experience
of the turbulent months of post-revolutionary Bavaria. For Hitler
himself, the significance of the period of revolution and
Raterepublik in Munich can hardly be overrated.

On his return to Munich, Hitler had been assigned to the 7th
Company of the Ist Reserve Battalion of the 2nd Infantry Regiment,
where, a few days later, he met up again with several wartime
comrades. A fortnight later, he and one of these comrades, Ernst
Schmidt, were among the fifteen men from his company (and 140
men in all) assigned to guard duties at the Traunstein prisoner-of-
war camp. Probably, as Schmidt later recounted, Hitler suggested
they let their names go forward when volunteers were called for to

make up the deputation. Hitler, remarked Schmidt, did not have
much to say about the revolution, ‘but it was plain enough to see
how bitter he felt’. Both, according to Schmidt, were repelled by the
changed conditions in the Munich barracks, now in the hands of the
soldiers’ councils, where old standards of authority, discipline, and
morale had collapsed. If that was indeed the reason for
volunteering, Hitler and Schmidt could have found no improvement
on reaching Traunstein. The camp, meant to contain 1,000 prisoners
but much overcrowded, was also run by the soldiers’ councils which
Hitler allegedly so detested. Discipline was poor, and the guards,
according to one source, included some of the worst elements
among the troops who -— like Hitler — saw the army ‘as a means of
maintaining a carefree existence at the expense of the state’. Hitler
and Schmidt had an easy time of things, mainly on gate-duty, at
Traunstein. They were there in all for almost two months, during
which time the prisoners-of-war, mainly Russians, were transported
elsewhere. By the beginning of February the camp was completely
cleared and disbanded. Probably in late January, as Schmidt hinted,
Hitler returned to Munich. Then, for just over two weeks, beginning
on 20 February, he was assigned to guard duty at the
Hauptbahnhof, where a unit of his company was responsible for
maintaining order, particularly among the many soldiers travelling
to and from Munich.

A routine order of the demobilization battalion on 3 April 1919
referred to Hitler by name as the representative (Vertrauensmann)
of his company. The strong likelihood is, in fact, that he had held
this position since 15 February. The duties of the representatives
included cooperation with the propaganda department of the
socialist government in order to convey ‘educational’ material to the
troops. Hitler’s first political duties took place, therefore, in the
service of the revolutionary regime run by the SPD and USPD. It is
little wonder that in Mein Kampf he quickly passed over his own
experience of the traumatic revolutionary period in Bavaria.

In fact, he would have had to explain away the even more
embarrassing fact of his continued involvement at the very height

of Munich’s ‘red dictatorship’. On 14 April, the day after the
communist Raterepublik had been proclaimed, the Munich soldiers’
councils approved fresh elections of all barrack representatives to
ensure that the Munich garrison stood loyally behind the new
regime. In the elections the following day Hitler was chosen as
Deputy Battalion Representative. Not only, then, did Hitler do
nothing to assist in the crushing of Munich’s ‘Red Republic’; he was
an elected representative of his battalion during the whole period of
its existence.

Already in the 1920s, and continuing into the 1930s, there were
rumours, never fully countered, that Hitler had initially
sympathized with the Majority SPD following the revolution. There
were even reported rumours — though without any supportive
evidence — that Hitler had spoken of joining the SPD. In a pointed
remark when defending Hermann Esser, one of his earliest
supporters, in 1921 against attacks from within the party, Hitler
commented: ‘Everyone was at one time a Social Democrat.’

In itself, Hitler’s possible support for the Majority Social
Democrats in the revolutionary upheaval is less unlikely than it
might at first sight appear. The political situation was extremely
confused and uncertain. A number of strange bedfellows, including
several who later came to belong to Hitler’s entourage, initially
found themselves on the Left during the revolution. Esser, who
became the first propaganda chief of the NSDAP, had been for a
while a journalist on a Social Democratic newspaper. Sepp Dietrich,
later a general in the Waffen-SS and head of Hitler’s SS-
Leibstandarte, was elected chairman of a soldiers’ council in
November 1918. Hitler’s long-time chauffeur Julius Schreck had
served in the ‘Red Army’ at the end of April 1919. Gottfried Feder,
whose views on ‘interest slavery’ so gripped Hitler’s imagination in
summer 1919, had sent a statement of his position to the socialist
government headed by Kurt Eisner the previous November. And
Balthasar Brandmayer, one of Hitler’s closest wartime comrades and
a later fervent supporter, recounted how he at first welcomed the
end of the monarchies, the establishment of a republic, and the

onset of a new era. Ideological muddle-headedness, political
confusion, and opportunism, combined frequently to produce fickle
and shifting allegiances.

That, as has been implied, Hitler was inwardly sympathetic to
Social Democracy and formed his own characteristic racist-
nationalist Weltanschauung only following an ideological volte-face
under the influence of his ‘schooling’ in the Reichswehr after the
collapse of the Raterepublik is, however, harder to believe. If Hitler
felt compelled to lean outwardly towards the Majority Social
Democrats during the revolutionary months, it was not prompted by
conviction but by sheer opportunism aimed at avoiding for as long
as possible demobilization from the army.

Whatever his opportunism and passivity, Hitler’s antagonism to
the revolutionary Left was probably evident to those around him in
the barracks during the months of mounting turmoil in Munich. If
indeed, as was later alleged, he voiced support for the Social
Democrats in preference to the Communists, it was presumably
viewed as a choice of the lesser of two evils, or even, by those in
Hitler’s unit who knew him of old, as an opportune adjustment
betraying none of his real nationalist, pan-German sympathies.
Ernst Schmidt, for example, who by then had been discharged but
was still in regular touch with him, spoke later of Hitler’s ‘utter
repugnance’ at the events in Munich. The nineteen votes cast for
‘Hittler’ on 16 April, electing him as the second company
representative — the winner, Johann Bliiml, received 39 votes — on
the Battalion Council, may well have been from those who saw him
in this light. That there were tensions within the barracks, and
between the soldiers’ elected representatives, might be read out of
the subsequent denunciation by Hitler of two colleagues on the
Battalion Council at the Munich tribunal investigating the actions of
the soldiers of his regiment during the Raterepublik. Hitler was
probably known to those around him, at the latest towards the end
of April, for the counter-revolutionary he really was, whose actual
sympathies were indistinguishable from those of the ‘white’ troops
preparing to storm the city. Significant, above all, is that within a

week of the end of the rule of the councils, Hitler had been
nominated — by whom is not known - to serve on a three-man
committee to explore whether members of the Reserve Battalion of
the 2nd Infantry Regiment had been actively involved in the
Raterepublik. This speaks in favour of the recognition within his
battalion of his deep antagonism to ‘red’ rule. At any rate, his new
role now prevented Hitler being discharged, along with the rest of
the Munich garrison, by the end of May 1919. More importantly, it
brought him for the first time into the orbit of counter-
revolutionary politics within the Reichswehr. This, rather than any
psychological trauma in Pasewalk at the news of the defeat, any
dramatic decision to rescue Germany from the ‘November
criminals’, was, within the following months, to open up his path
into the maelstrom of extreme right-wing politics in Munich.

Ill

On 11 May 1919, under the command of Generalmajor von Mohl,
the Bayerische Reichswehr Gruppenkommando Nr.4 (‘Gruko’ for
short) was created from the Bavarian units that had been involved
in the crushing of the Raterepublik. With the Bavarian government
‘exiled’ in Bamberg until the end of August, Munich — its centre
crammed with barricades, barbed wire, and army control-points —
was throughout the spring and summer a city effectively under
military rule. Recognizing twin tasks of extensive surveillance of
the political scene and combating by means of propaganda and
indoctrination ‘dangerous’ attitudes prevalent in the transitional
army, Gruko took over in May 1919 the ‘Information Department’
(Nachrichtenabteilung, Abt. Ib/P) which had been immediately
established in Munich at the suppression of the Raterepublik. The
‘education’ of the troops in a ‘correct’ anti-Bolshevik, nationalist
fashion was rapidly regarded as a priority, and ‘speaker courses’
were devised in order to train ‘suitable personalities from the
troops’ who would remain for some considerable time in the army
and function as propaganda agents with qualities of persuasion

capable of negating subversive ideas. The organization of a series of
‘anti-Bolshevik courses’, beginning in early June, was placed in the
hands of Captain Karl Mayr, who, a short while earlier, on 30 May,
had taken over the command of the Information Department. Mayr,
one of the ‘midwives’ of Hitler’s political ‘career’, could certainly
have claimed prime responsibility for its initial launch.

In 1919, Mayr’s influence in the Munich Reichswehr extended
beyond his rank as captain, and he was endowed with considerable
funds to build up a team of agents or informants, organize the series
of ‘educational’ courses to train selected officers and men in ‘correct’
political and ideological thinking, and finance ‘patriotic’ parties,
publications, and organizations. Mayr first met Hitler in May 1919,
after the crushing of the ‘Red Army’. Hitler’s involvement in his
battalion’s investigations into subversive actions during the
Raterepublik may have drawn him to Mayr’s attention. And we saw
that Hitler had already been engaged in propaganda work in his
barracks earlier in the spring — though on behalf of the socialist
government. He had the right credentials and ideal potential for
Mayr’s purposes. When he first met Hitler, Mayr wrote much later,
‘he was like a tired stray dog looking for a master’, and ‘ready to
throw in his lot with anyone who would show him kindness ... He
was totally unconcerned about the German people and their
destinies.’

The name ‘Hittler Adolf appears on one of the early lists of
names of informants (V-Leute or V-Mdnner) drawn up by the
Information Department Ib/P at the end of May or beginning of
June 1919. Within days he had been assigned to the first of the anti-
Bolshevik ‘instruction courses’, to take place in Munich University
between 5 and 12 June 1919. For the first time, Hitler was to
receive here some form of directed political ‘education’. This, as he
acknowledged, was important to him; as was the fact that he
realized for the first time that he could make an impact on those
around him. Here he heard lectures from prominent figures in
Munich, hand-picked by Mayr, partly through personal
acquaintance, on ‘German History since the Reformation’, ‘The

Political History of the War’, ‘Socialism in Theory and Practice’,
‘Our Economic Situation and the Peace Conditions’, and “The
Connection between Domestic and Foreign Policy’. Among the
speakers, too, was Gottfried Feder, who had made a name for
himself among the Pan-Germans as an economics expert. His lecture
on the ‘breaking of interest slavery’ (a slogan Hitler recognized as
having propaganda potential), on which he had already published a
‘manifesto’ — highly regarded in nationalist circles — distinguishing
between ‘productive’ capital and ‘rapacious’ capital (which he
associated with the Jews), made a deep impression on Hitler, and
eventually led to Feder’s role as the economics ‘gurw’ of the early
Nazi Party. The history lectures were delivered by the Munich
historian Professor Karl Alexander von Miiller, who had known
Mayr at school. Following his first lecture, he came across a small
group in the emptying lecture hall surrounding a man addressing
them in a passionate, strikingly guttural, tone. He mentioned to
Mayr after his next lecture that one of his trainees had natural
rhetorical talent. Von Muller pointed out where he was sitting.
Mayr recognized him immediately: it was ‘Hitler from the List
Regiment’.

Hitler himself thought this incident — he said he had been roused
to intervene by one of the participants defending the Jews — had led
directly to his deployment as an ‘educational officer’
(Bildungsoffizier). However, he was never a Bildungsoffizier, but
remained a mere informant, a V-Mann. Plainly, the incident helped
to focus Mayr’s attention on Hitler. But it was certainly Mayr’s
regular close observation of Hitler’s activity for his department
rather than a single incident that led to the latter’s selection as one
of a squad of twenty-six instructors — all drawn from the
participants in the Munich ‘instruction courses’ — to be sent to
conduct a five-day course at the Reichswehr camp at Lechfeld, near
Augsburg. The course, beginning on 20 August 1919, the day after
Hitler’s arrival in the camp, was arranged in response to complaints
about the political unreliability of men stationed there, many
having returned from being held as prisoners-of-war and now

awaiting discharge. The task of the squad was to inculcate
nationalist and anti-Bolshevik sentiments in the troops, described as
‘infected’ by Bolshevism and Spartacism. It was in effect the
continuation of what the instructors themselves had been exposed to
in Munich.

Alongside the commander of the unit, Rudolf Beyschlag, Hitler
undertook the lion’s share of the work, including helping to stir
discussion of Beyschlag’s lectures on, for example, ‘Who Bears the
Guilt for the World War?’ and ‘From the Days of the Munich
Raterepublik’. He himself gave lectures on ‘Peace Conditions and
Reconstruction’, ‘Emigration’, and ‘Social and Economic
Catchwords’. He threw himself with passion into the work. His
engagement was total. And he immediately found he could strike a
chord with his audience, that the way he spoke roused the soldiers
listening to him from their passivity and cynicism. Hitler was in his
element. For the first time in his life, he had found something at
which he was an unqualified success. Almost by chance, he had
stumbled across his greatest talent. As he himself put it, he could
‘speak’.

Participants’ reports on the course confirm that Hitler was not
exaggerating the impact he made in Lechfeld: he was without
question the star performer. A central feature of his demagogic
armoury was antisemitism. In his ferocious attacks on the Jews, he
was, however, doing no more than reflect sentiments which were
widespread at the time among the people of Munich, as reports on
the popular mood demonstrated. The responses to Hitler’s addresses
at Lechfeld indicate how accessible the soldiers were to his way of
speaking. The commander of the Lechfeld camp, Oberleutnant
Bendt, even felt obliged to request Hitler to tone down his
antisemitism, in order to prevent possible objections to the lectures
as provoking antisemitic agitation. This followed a lecture by Hitler
on capitalism, in which he had ‘touched on’ the ‘Jewish Question’. It
is the first reference to Hitler speaking publicly about the Jews.

Within the group, and certainly in the eyes of his superior,
Captain Mayr, Hitler must have acquired the reputation of an

‘expert’ on the ‘Jewish Question’. When Mayr was asked, in a letter
of 4 September 1919 from a former participant on one of the
‘instruction courses’, Adolf Gemlich from Ulm, for clarification of
the ‘Jewish Question’, particularly in relation to the policies of the
Social Democratic government, he passed it to Hitler - whom he
evidently regarded highly — for an answer. Hitler’s well-known
reply to Gemlich, dated 16 September 1919, is his first recorded
written statement about the ‘Jewish Question’. He wrote that
antisemitism should be based not on emotion, but on ‘facts’, the first
of which was that Jewry was a race, not a religion. Emotive
antisemitism would produce pogroms, he continued; antisemitism
based on ‘reason’ must, on the other hand, lead to the systematic
removal of the rights of Jews. ‘Its final aim,’ he concluded, ‘must
unshakeably be the removal of the Jews altogether.’

The Gemlich letter reveals for the first time key basic elements of
Hitler’s Weltanschauung which from then on remained unaltered to
the last days in the Berlin bunker: antisemitism resting on race
theory; and the creation of a unifying nationalism founded on the
need to combat the external and internal power of the Jews.

Following his success at Lechfeld, he was by this time plainly
Mayr’s favourite and right-hand man. Among the duties of the
informants assigned to Mayr was the surveillance of fifty political
parties and organizations ranging from the extreme Right to the far
Left in Munich. It was as an informant that Hitler was sent, on
Friday, 12 September 1919, to report on a meeting of the German
Workers’ Party in Munich’s Sterneckerbrau. He was accompanied by
at least two former comrades from Lechfeld. The speaker was to
have been the volkisch poet and publicist Dietrich Eckart, but he was
ill and Gottfried Feder stood in to lecture on the ‘breaking of
interest slavery’. According to his own account, Hitler had heard the
lecture before, so took to observing the party itself, which he held
to be a ‘boring organization’, no different from the many other

small parties sprouting in every corner of Munich at that time. He
was about to leave when, in the discussion following the lecture, an
invited guest, a Professor Baumann, attacked Feder and then spoke
in favour of Bavarian separatism. At this Hitler intervened so
heatedly that Baumann, totally deflated, took his hat and left even
while Hitler was still speaking, looking ‘like a wet poodle’. The
party chairman, Anton Drexler, was so impressed by Hitler’s
intervention that at the end of the meeting he pushed a copy of his
own pamphlet, My Political Awakening, into his hand, inviting him to
return in a few days if he were interested in joining the new
movement. ‘Goodness, he’s got a gob. We could use him,’ Drexler
was reported to have remarked. According to Hitler’s own account,
he read Drexler’s pamphlet in the middle of a sleepless night, and it
struck a chord with him, reminding him, he claimed, of his own
‘political awakening’ twelve years earlier. Within a week of
attending the meeting, he then received a postcard informing him
that he had been accepted as a member, and should attend a
committee meeting of the party a few days later to discuss the
matter. Though his immediate reaction, he wrote, was a negative
one — he allegedly wanted to found a party of his own - curiosity
overcame him and he went along to a dimly-lit meeting of the small
leadership group in the Altes Rosenbad, a shabby pub in
Herrenstrafge. He sympathized with the political aims of those he
met. But he was appalled, he later wrote, at the small-minded
organization he encountered — ‘club life of the worst manner and
sort’, he dubbed it. After a few days of indecision, he added, he
finally made up his mind to join. What determined him was the
feeling that such a small organization offered ‘the individual an
opportunity for real personal activity’ — the prospect, that is, of
quickly making his mark and dominating it.

Some time during the second half of September, Hitler joined the
German Workers’ Party, and was given the membership number
555. He was not, as he always claimed, the seventh member. As the
first party leader, Anton Drexler, put it in a letter addressed to
Hitler in January 1940, but never sent:

No one knows better than you yourself, my Fiihrer, that you were never the seventh
member of the party, but at best the seventh member of the committee, which I asked you
to join as recruitment director (Werbeobmann). And a few years ago I had to complain toa
party office that your first proper membership card of the DAP ... was falsified, with the
number 555 being erased and number 7 entered.

Like so much of what Hitler had to say in Mein Kampf about his
earlier life, his account of entering the party cannot be taken at face
value, and was devised, like everything else, to serve the Fuhrer
legend that was already being cultivated. And whatever Hitler
wrote about wrangling for days about whether or not to join the
DAP, the decision might not ultimately have been his to take. In a
little noticed piece of evidence, his Reichswehr boss Captain Mayr
later claimed that he had ordered Hitler to join the German Workers’
Party to help foster its growth. For this purpose, Mayr went on, he
was provided at first with funds — around the equivalent of 20 gold
Marks a week - and, contrary to normal practice about members of
the Reichswehr joining political parties, was allowed to stay in the
army. He was able to do this, drawing his army pay as well as
speaker fees, until his discharge on 31 March 1920. This already
enabled him — in contrast to the other DAP leaders who had to fit
politics around their normal jobs — to devote all his time to political
propaganda. Now, on leaving the army, his confidence boosted by
his early successes as a DAP speaker in the Munich beerhalls, he was
in a position to do what, since he had made his mark in the anti-
Bolshevik course at Munich University and worked with Mayr as a
Reichswehr propagandist and informant, had emerged as a ready-
made career-opening to replace the fantasies of becoming a great
architect and the realities of returning to an existence as a small-
time painter of street scenes and tourist attractions. Without
Captain Mayr’s ‘talent-spotting’, Hitler might never have been heard
of. As it was, if only on the beerhall fringes, he could now become a
full-time political agitator and propagandist. He could do for a
living the only thing he was good at doing: speaking.

The path from Pasewalk to becoming the main attraction of the
DAP had not been determined by any sudden recognition of a
‘mission’ to save Germany, by strength of personality, or by a

‘triumph of the will’. It had been shaped by circumstance,
opportunism, good fortune, and, not least, the backing of the army,
represented through Mayr’s important patronage. Hitler did not
come to politics; politics came to him — in the Munich barracks. His
contribution, after making his mark through a readiness to
denounce his comrades following the Raterepublik, had been
confined to an unusual talent for appealing to the gutter instincts of
his listeners, in the Lechfeld camp, then in the Munich beerhalls,
coupled with a sharp eye to exploiting the main chance of
advancement. These ‘qualities’ would prove invaluable in the
coming years.

Without the Reichswehr’s ‘discovery’ of his talent for nationalist
agitation, Hitler had every prospect of returning to the margins of
society — an embittered war veteran with little chance of personal
advancement. Without his self-discovery that he could ‘speak’,
Hitler would not have been able to contemplate the possibility of
making a living from politics. But without the extraordinary
political climate of post-war Germany, and, quite especially, the
unique conditions in Bavaria, Hitler would have found himself in
any case without an audience, his ‘talent’ pointless and
unrecognized, his tirades of hate without echo, the backing from
those close to the avenues of power, on whom he depended,
unforthcoming.

When he joined the infant German Workers’ Party in September
1919, he was still, as he himself put it, among the ‘nameless’ - a
nobody. Within three years, he was being showered with letters of
adulation, spoken of in nationalist circles as Germany’s Mussolini,
even compared with Napoleon. And little more than four years
later, he had attained national, not just regional, notoriety as a
leader of an attempt to take over the power of the state by force.
He had of course failed miserably in this — and his political ‘career’
looked to be (and ought to have been) at an end. But he was now a

‘somebody’. The first part of Hitler’s astonishing rise from
anonymity to prominence dates from these years in Munich — the
years of his political apprenticeship.

It is natural to presume that such a swift rise even to provincial
celebrity status must have been the result of some extraordinary
personal qualities. Without doubt, Hitler did possess abilities and
traits of character that contributed towards making him a political
force to be reckoned with. To ignore them or disparage them totally
would be to make the same mistakes of underestimation made by
his political enemies, who ridiculed him and regarded him as a mere
cipher for the interests of others. But Hitler’s personality and his
talents, such as they were, alone do not explain the adulation
already being lavished on him by growing numbers in the volkisch
camp by 1922. The origins of a leadership cult reflected the
mentalities and expectations prevalent in some sectors of German
society at the time, more than they did special qualities of Hitler.
Nor would his abilities as a mob-orator, which were most of what
he had to offer at the time, in themselves have been sufficient to
have lifted him to a position where he could, even if for a mere few
hours — in retrospect, hours of pure melodrama, even farce — head a
challenge to the might of the German state. To come this far, he
needed influential patrons.

Without the changed conditions, the product of a lost war,
revolution, and a pervasive sense of national humiliation, Hitler
would have remained a nobody. His main ability by far, as he came
to realize during the course of 1919, was that in the prevailing
circumstances he could inspire an audience which shared his basic
political feelings, by the way he spoke, by the force of his rhetoric,
by the very power of his prejudice, by the conviction he conveyed
that there was a way out of Germany’s plight, and that only the way
he outlined was the road to national rebirth. Another time, another
place, and the message would have been ineffective, absurd even.
As it was, indeed, in the early 1920s the great majority of the
citizens of Munich, let alone of a wider population to whom Hitler
was, if at all, known only as a provincial Bavarian hot-head and

rabble-rouser, could not be captivated by it. Nevertheless, at this
time and in this place, Hitler’s message did capture exactly the
uncontainable sense of anger, fear, frustration, resentment, and
pent-up aggression of the raucous gatherings in the Munich
beerhalls. The compulsive manner of his speaking derived in turn
much of its power of persuasion from the strength of conviction that
combined with appealingly simple diagnoses of and recipes to
Germany’s problems.

Above all, what came naturally to Hitler was to stoke up the
hatred of others by pouring out to them the hatred that was so
deeply embedded in himself. Even so, this had never before had the
effect it was to have now, in the changed post-war conditions.
What, in the Men’s Home in Vienna, in the Munich cafés, and in the
regimental field headquarters, had been at best tolerated as an
eccentricity now turned out to be Hitler’s major asset. This in itself
suggests that what had changed above all was the milieu and
context in which Hitler operated; that we should look in the first
instance less to his own personality than to the motives and actions
of those who came to be Hitler’s supporters, admirers, and devotees
— and not least his powerful backers — to explain his first
breakthrough on the political scene. For what becomes clear —
without falling into the mistake of presuming that he was no more
than the puppet of the ‘ruling classes’ — is that Hitler would have
remained a political nonentity without the patronage and support he
obtained from influential circles in Bavaria. During this period,
Hitler was seldom, if ever, master of his own destiny. The key
decisions — to take over the party leadership in 1921, to engage in
the putsch adventure in 1923 — were not carefully conceived
actions, but desperate forward moves to save face — behaviour
characteristic of Hitler to the end.

It was as a propagandist, not as an ideologue with a unique or
special set of political ideas, that Hitler made his mark in these
early years. There was nothing new, different, original, or
distinctive about the ideas he was peddling in the Munich beerhalls.
They were common currency among the various volkisch groups and

sects and had already been advanced in all their essentials by the
pre-war Pan-Germans. What Hitler did was advertise unoriginal
ideas in an original way. He gave voice to phobias, prejudice, and
resentment as no one else could. Others could say the same thing
but make no impact at all. It was less what he said, than how he said
it that counted. As it was to be throughout his ‘career’, presentation
was what mattered. He consciously learnt how to make an
impression through his speaking. He learnt how to devise effective
propaganda and to maximize the impact of targeting specific
scapegoats. He learnt, in other words, that he was able to mobilize
the masses. For him this was from the outset the route to the
attainment of political goals. The ability to convince himself that his
way and no other could succeed was the platform for the conviction
that he conveyed to others. Conversely, the response of the beerhall
crowds — later the mass rallies — gave him the certainty, the self-
assurance, the sense of security, which at this time he otherwise
lacked. He needed the orgasmic excitement which only the ecstatic
masses could give him. The satisfaction gained from the rapturous
response and wild applause of cheering crowds must have offered
compensation for the emptiness of his personal relations. More than
that, it was a sign that he was a success, after three decades in
which — apart from the pride he took in his war record — he had no
achievements of note to set against his outsized ego.

Simplicity and repetition were two key ingredients in his
speaking armoury. These revolved around the unvarying essential
driving-points of his message: the nationalization of the masses, the
reversal of the great ‘betrayal’ of 1918, the destruction of
Germany’s internal enemies (above all the ‘removal’ of the Jews),
and material and psychological rebuilding as the prerequisite for
external struggle and the attainment of a position of world power.
This conception of the path to Germany’s ‘salvation’ and rebirth was
already partially devised, at least in embryo, by the date of his
letter to Gemlich in September 1919. Important strands remained,
however, to be added. The central notion of the quest for ‘living
space’ in eastern Europe was, for instance, not fully incorporated

until the middle of the decade. It was only in the two years or so
following the putsch debacle, therefore, that his ideas finally came
together to form the characteristic fully-fledged Weltanschauung that
thereafter remained unaltered.

But all this is to run ahead of the crucial developments which
shaped the first passage of Hitler’s political ‘career’ as the beerhall
agitator of an insignificant Munich racist party and the
circumstances under which he came to lead that party.

The crowds that began to flock in 1919 and 1920 to Hitler’s
speeches were not motivated by refined theories. For them, simple
slogans, kindling the fires of anger, resentment, and hatred, were
what worked. But what they were offered in the Munich beerhalls
was nevertheless a vulgarized version of ideas which were in far
wider circulation. Hitler acknowledged in Mein Kampf that there
was no essential distinction between the ideas of the volkisch
movement and those of National Socialism. He had little interest in
clarifying or systematizing these ideas. Of course, he had his own
obsessions — a few basic notions which never left him after 1919,
became formed into a rounded ‘world-view’ in the mid-1920s, and
provided the driving-force of his ‘mission’ to ‘rescue’ Germany. But
ideas held no interest for Hitler as abstractions. They were
important to him only as tools of mobilization. Hitler’s achievement
as a speaker was, therefore, to become the main popularizer of
ideas that were in no way his invention, and that served other
interests as well as his own.

When Hitler joined the German Workers’ Party, it was one of
some seventy-three volkisch groups in Germany, most of them
founded since the end of the war. In Munich alone there were at
least fifteen in 1920. Within the volkisch pool of ideas, the notion of
a specifically German or national socialism, tied in with an onslaught
on ‘Jewish’ capitalism, had gained ground in the last phase of the
war, and spawned both Drexler’s German Workers’ Party and what

was soon to become its arch-rival, the German-Socialist Party
(Deutschsozialistische Partei).

Already during the war, Munich had been a major centre of anti-
government nationalist agitation by the Pan-Germans, who found a
valuable outlet for their propaganda in the publishing house of
Julius F. Lehmann, otherwise renowned for the publication of texts
on medicine. Lehmann was a member of the Thule Society, a
volkisch club of a few hundred well-heeled individuals, run like a
masonic lodge, that had been founded in Munich at the turn of the
year 1917-18 out of the pre-war Germanen-Orden, set up in Leipzig
in 1912 to bring together a variety of minor antisemitic groups and
organizations. Its membership list, including alongside Lehmann the
‘economics expert’ Gottfried Feder, the publicist Dietrich Eckart, the
journalist and co-founder of the DAP Karl Harrer, and the young
nationalists Hans Frank, Rudolf Hefg, and Alfred Rosenberg, reads
like a Who’s Who of early Nazi sympathizers and leading figures in
Munich. The colourful and rich head of the Thule Society, Rudolf
Freiherr von Sebottendorff — a cosmopolitan adventurer and self-
styled aristocrat who was actually the son of a train-driver and had
made his fortune through shady deals in Turkey and an opportune
marriage to a rich heiress — ensured that meetings could be held in
Munich’s best hotel, the ‘Vier Jahreszeiten’, and provided the
volkisch movement in Munich with its own newspaper, the
Muinchener Beobachter (renamed in August 1919 as the Volkischer
Beobachter, and eventually bought by the Nazis in December 1920).
It was from the Thule Society that the initiative arose towards the
end of the war to try to influence the working class in Munich. Karl
Harrer was commissioned to attempt this, and made contact with a
railway workshop locksmith, Anton Drexler. Having been found
unfit for military service, Drexler had in 1917 temporarily found an
expression of his nationalist and racist sentiments in the short-lived
but huge, rabidly pro-war Fatherland Party. Then, in March 1918,
he had founded a ‘Workers’ Committee for a Good Peace’ in an
effort to stir enthusiasm for the war effort among Munich’s working
class. He combined his extreme nationalism with an anti-capitalism

demanding draconian action against profiteers and speculators.
Harrer, a sports-reporter on the right-wing Mtinchner-Augsburger
Abendzeitung, persuaded Drexler and a few others to set up a
‘Political Workers’ Circle’ (Politischer Arbeiterzirkel). The ‘Circle’, a
group of usually three to seven members, met periodically for about
a year from November 1918 onwards to discuss nationalist and
racist themes — such as the Jews as Germany’s enemy, or
responsibility for the war and defeat — usually introduced by Harrer.
Whereas Harrer preferred the semi-secretive volkisch ‘club’, Drexler
thought discussing recipes for Germany’s salvation in such a tiny
group had scant value, and wanted to found a political party. He
proposed in December the setting up of a ‘German Workers’ Party’
which would be ‘free of Jews’. The idea was well received, and, on
5 January 1919, at a small gathering — mainly contacts from the
railway yards — in the Ftirstenfelder Hof in Munich, the German
Workers’ Party was formed. Drexler was elected chairman of the
Munich branch (the only one that existed), while Harrer was given
the honorary title of ‘Reich Chairman’. Only in the more favourable
climate after the crushing of the Raterepublik was the infant party
able to stage its first public meetings. Attendance was sparse. Ten
members were present on 17 May, thirty-eight when Dietrich Eckart
spoke in August, and forty-one on 12 September. This was the
occasion on which Hitler attended for the first time.

Vil

Hitler’s part in the early development of the German Workers’ Party
(subsequently the NSDAP) is obscured more than it is clarified by
his own tendentious account in Mein Kampf. And, as throughout his
book, Hitler’s version of events is aimed, more than all else, at
elevating his own role as it denigrates, plays down, or simply
ignores that of all others involved. It amounts to the story of a
political genius going his way in the face of adversity, a heroic
triumph of the will. In his own version, he had joined a tiny body
with grandiose ideas but no hope of realizing them, raising it single-

handedly to a force of the first magnitude which would come to
rescue Germany from its plight. Towering over the weak and
vacillating early leaders of the party, certain of himself and of the
coming to fruition of his mighty vision, proven successful in his
methods, his greatness — so his account was designed to illustrate —
was apparent even in these first months after joining the movement.
There could be no doubt about his claim to supremacy in the
volkisch movement against all pretenders.

After dealing with subsequent successes in building up the party’s
following, Hitler returned to the early party history in a later
passage in Mein Kampf when, surprisingly briefly and remarkably
vaguely, he described his takeover of the party leadership in mid-
1921. His terse summary simply indicates that after intrigues
against him and ‘the attempt of a group of volkisch lunatics’,
supported by the party chairman (Drexler), to obtain the leadership
of the party had collapsed, a general membership meeting
unanimously gave him leadership over the whole movement. His
reorganization of the movement on 1 August 1921 swept away the
old, ineffectual quasi-parliamentary way of running party matters
by committee and internal democracy, and substituted for it the
leadership principle as the organizational basis of the party. His
own absolute supremacy was thereby assured.

Here, it seems, embodied in the description in Mein Kampf, is the
realization of Hitler’s ambition for dictatorial power in the
movement — subsequently in the German state — which could be
witnessed in his early conflicts with Harrer and Drexler, and his
rejection of the initial inner-party democratic style. The weakness of
lesser mortals, their inability to see the light, the certainty with
which he went his own way, and the need to follow a supreme
leader who alone could ensure ultimate triumph — these, from the
outset, are the dominant themes. The beginning of his claim to
leadership can thus be located in the earliest phase of his actitity
within the party. In turn, this suggests that the self-awareness of
political genius was present from the beginning.

Little wonder that, on the basis of this story, the enigma of Hitler
is profound. The ‘nobody of Vienna’, the corporal who is not even
promoted to sergeant, now appears with a full-blown political
philosophy, a strategy for success, and a burning will to lead his
party and sees himself as Germany’s coming great leader. However
puzzling and extraordinary, the underlying thrust of Hitler’s self-
depiction has found a surprising degree of acceptance. But, though
not inaccurate in all respects, it requires substantial modification
and qualification.

The break with Karl Harrer soon came. It was not, however, an
early indicator of Hitler’s relentless striving for dictatorial power in
the movement. Nor was it simply a matter of whether the party
should be a mass movement or a type of closed volkisch debating
society. A number of volkisch organizations at the time faced the
same problem, and attempted to combine an appeal to a mass
audience with regular meetings of an exclusive ‘inner circle’. Harrer
tended strongly towards the latter, represented by the ‘Workers’
Circle’, which he himself controlled, in contrast to the party’s
‘Working Committee’, where he was simply an ordinary member.
But Harrer found himself increasingly isolated. Drexler was as keen
as Hitler to take the party’s message to the masses. He later claimed
that he, and not Hitler, had proposed announcing the party’s
programme at a mass meeting in the Hofbrauhausfestsaal, and that
Hitler had initially been sceptical about the prospects of filling the
hall. As long as Harrer directed the party through his control of the
‘Workers’ Circle’, the question of the more viable propaganda
strategy would remain unresolved. It was necessary, therefore, to
enhance the role of the Committee, which Drexler and Hitler did in
draft regulations that they drew up in December, giving it complete
authority and ruling out any ‘superior or side government, whether
as a circle or lodge’. The draft regulations — bearing Hitler’s clear
imprint — determined that the Committee’s members and its
chairman should be elected in an open meeting. Their unity, it went
on, would be ensured through strict adherence to the programme of
the party (which Hitler and Drexler were already preparing). The

new regulations were plainly directed against Harrer. But they were
not devised as a stepping-stone on the way to Hitler’s supreme
power in the party. Evidently, he had no notion of dictatorial party
rule at the time. He was ready to accept the corporate leadership of
an elected committee. Decisions to stage mass meetings in the next
months were, it seems, those of the Committee as a whole,
approved by a majority of its members, not Hitler’s alone, though,
once Harrer had departed and in view of Hitler’s increasing success
in drawing the crowds to listen to his speeches, it is hard to believe
that there was any dissension. Harrer alone, it appears, opposed the
staging of an ambitious mass meeting in early 1920, and accepted
the consequences of his defeat by resigning. Personal animosity also
played a role. Harrer, remarkably, thought little of Hitler as a
speaker. Hitler was in turn contemptuous of Harrer.

The party’s first mass meeting was initially planned to take place
in January 1920, but had to be postponed because of a general ban
on public meetings at the time. It was rescheduled for the
Hofbrauhaus on 24 February. The main worry was that the
attendance would be embarrassingly small. This was why, since
Drexler recognized that neither he nor Hitler had any public profile,
he approached Dr Johannes Dingfelder, not even a party member
but well known in Munich volkisch circles, to deliver the main
speech. Hitler’s name was not even mentioned in any of the
publicity. Nor was there any hint that the party’s programme would
be proclaimed at the meeting.

The twenty-five points of this programme — which would in the
course of time be declared ‘unalterable’ and be in practice largely
ignored — had been worked out and drafted over the previous weeks
by Drexler and Hitler. Its points - among them, demands for a
Greater Germany, land and colonies, discrimination against Jews
and denial of citizenship to them, breaking ‘interest slavery’,
confiscation of war profits, land reform, protection of the middle
class, persecution of profiteers, and tight regulation of the press —
contained little or nothing that was original or novel on the volkisch
Right. Religious neutrality was included in the attempt to avoid

alienating a large church-going population in Bavaria. ‘Common
good before individual good’ was an unobjectionable banality. The
demand for ‘a strong central power’ in the Reich, and ‘the
unconditional authority’ of a ‘central parliament’, though clearly
implying authoritarian, not pluralistic, government, gives no
indication that Hitler envisaged himself at this stage as the head of
a personalized regime. There are some striking omissions. Neither
Marxism nor Bolshevism is mentioned. The entire question of
agriculture is passed over, apart from the brief reference to land
reform. The authorship of the programme cannot be fully clarified.
Probably, the individual points derived from several sources among
the party’s leading figures. The attack on ‘interest slavery’ obviously
drew on Gottfried Feder’s pet theme. Profit-sharing was a favourite
idea of Drexler. The forceful style sounds like Hitler’s. As he later
asserted, he certainly worked on it. But probably the main author
was Drexler himself. Drexler certainly claimed this in the private
letter he wrote to Hitler (though did not send) in January 1940. In
this letter, he stated that ‘following all the basic points already
written down by me, Adolf Hitler composed with me — and with no
one else — the 25 theses of National Socialism, in long nights in the
workers’ canteen at Burghausenerstrafge 6’.

Despite worries about the attendance at the party’s first big
meeting, some 2,000 people (perhaps a fifth of them socialist
opponents) were crammed into the Festsaal of the Hofbrauhaus on
24 February when Hitler, as chairman, opened the meeting.
Dingfelder’s speech was unremarkable. Certainly, it was un-Hitler-
like in style and tone. The word ‘Jew’ was never mentioned. He
blamed Germany’s fate on the decline of morality and religion, and
the rise of selfish, material values. His recipe for recovery was
‘order, work, and dutiful sacrifice for the salvation of the
Fatherland’. The speech was well received and uninterrupted. The
atmosphere suddenly livened when Hitler came to speak. His tone
was harsher, more aggressive, less academic, than Dingfelder’s. The
language he used was expressive, direct, coarse, earthy — that used
and understood by most of his audience — his sentences short and

punchy. He heaped insults on target-figures like the leading Centre
Party politician and Reich Finance Minister Matthias Erzberger
(who had signed the Armistice in 1918 and strongly advocated
acceptance of the detested Versailles Treaty the following summer)
or the Munich capitalist Isidor Bach, sure of the enthusiastic
applause of his audience. Verbal assaults on the Jews brought new
cheers from the audience, while shrill attacks on profiteers
produced cries of ‘Flog them! Hang them!’ When he came to read
out the party programme, there was much applause for the
individual points. But there were interruptions, too, from left-wing
opponents, who had already been getting restless, and the police
reporter of the meeting spoke of scenes of ‘great tumult so that I
often thought it would come to brawling at any minute’. Hitler
announced, to storms of applause, what would remain the party’s
slogan: ‘Our motto is only struggle. We will go our way
unshakeably to our goal.’ The end of Hitler’s speech, in which he
read out a protest at an alleged decision to provide 40,000
hundredweight of flour for the Jewish community, again erupted
into uproar following further opposition heckling, with people
standing on tables and chairs yelling at each other. In the
subsequent ‘discussion’, four others spoke briefly, two of them
opponents. Remarks from the last speaker that a dictatorship from
the Right would be met with a dictatorship from the Left were the
signal for a further uproar, such that Hitler’s words closing the
meeting were drowned. Around 100 Independent Socialists and
Communists poured out of the Hofbrauhaus on to the streets
cheering for the International and the Raterepublik and booing the
war-heroes Hindenburg and Ludendorff, and the German
Nationalists. The meeting had not exactly produced the ‘hall full of
people united by a new conviction, a new faith, a new will’ that
Hitler was later to describe.

Nor would anyone reading Munich newspapers in the days
following the meeting have gained the impression that it was a
landmark heralding the arrival of a new, dynamic party and a new
political hero. The press’s reaction was muted, to say the least. The

newspapers concentrated in their brief reports on Dingfelder’s
speech and paid little attention to Hitler. Even the Volkischer
Beobachter, not yet under party control but sympathetic, was
surprisingly low-key. It reported the meeting in a single column in
an inside page four days later.

Despite this initial modest impact, it was already apparent that
Hitler meetings meant political fireworks. Even in the hothouse of
Munich politics, the big meetings of the National Socialist German
Workers’ Party (NSDAP), as the movement henceforth called itself,
were something different. Hitler wanted above all else to make his
party noticed. In this he rapidly succeeded. ‘It makes no difference
whatever whether they laugh at us or revile us,’ he later wrote,
‘whether they represent us as clowns or criminals; the main thing is
that they mention us, that they concern themselves with us again
and again ...” He observed the dull, lifeless meetings of bourgeois
parties, the deadening effect of speeches read out like academic
lectures by dignified, elderly gentlemen. Nazi meetings, he recorded
with pride, were, by contrast, not peaceful. He learnt from the
organization of meetings by the Left, how they were orchestrated,
the value of intimidation of opponents, techniques of disruption,
and how to deal with disturbances. The NSDAP’s meetings aimed to
attract confrontation, and as a result to make the party noticed.
Posters were drafted in vivid red to provoke the Left to attend. In
mid-1920 Hitler personally designed the party’s banner with the
swastika in a white circle on a red background, devised to make as
striking a visual impact as possible. The result was that meetings
were packed long before the start, and the numbers of opponents
present guaranteed that the atmosphere was potentially explosive.
To combat trouble, a ‘hall protection’ squad was fully organized by
mid-1920, became the ‘Gymnastic and Sports Section’ in August
1921, and eventually developed into the ‘Storm Section’
(Sturmabteilung, or SA).

Only Hitler could bring in the crowds for the NSDAP. In front of
a beerhall audience his style was electrifying. While in his
Nuremberg cell awaiting the hangman, Hans Frank, the ex-Governor

General of Poland, recalled the moment, in January 1920, while he
was still only nineteen years old (though already committed to the
volkisch cause), that he had first heard Hitler speak. The large room
was bursting at the seams. Middle-class citizens rubbed shoulders
with workers, soldiers, and students. Whether old or young, the
state of the nation weighed heavily on people. Germany’s plight
polarized opinions, but left few unmoved or disinterested. Most
political meetings were packed. But, to Frank — young, idealistic,
fervently anti-Marxist and nationalistic - speakers were generally
disappointing, had little to offer. Hitler, in stark contrast, set him
alight.

The man with whom Hans Frank’s fate would be bound for the
next quarter of a century was dressed in a shabby blue suit, his tie
loosely fastened. He spoke clearly, in impassioned but not shrill
tones, his blue eyes flashing, occasionally pushing back his hair with
his right hand. Frank’s most immediate feeling was how sincere
Hitler was, how the words came from the heart and were not just a
rhetorical device. ‘He was at that time simply the grandiose popular
speaker without precedent — and, for me, incomparable,’ wrote
Frank.

I was strongly impressed straight away. It was totally different from what was otherwise to
be heard in meetings. His method was completely clear and simple. He took the
overwhelmingly dominant topic of the day, the Versailles Diktat, and posed the question of
all questions: What now German people? What’s the true situation? What alone is now
possible? He spoke for over two-and-a-half hours, often interrupted by frenetic torrents of
applause — and one could have listened to him for much, much longer. Everything came
from the heart, and he struck a chord with all of us ... When he finished, the applause
would not die down ... From this evening onwards, though not a party member, I was
convinced that if one man could do it, Hitler alone would be capable of mastering
Germany’s fate.

Whatever the pathos of these comments, they testify to Hitler’s
instinctive ability, singling him out from other speakers relaying a
similar message, to speak in the language of his listeners, and to stir
them through the passion and — however strange it might now
sound to us — the apparent sincerity of his idealism.

Rising attendances marked Hitler’s growing success and mounting
reputation as the party’s star speaker. By the end of 1920 he had
addressed over thirty mass meetings — mostly of between 800 and
2,500 persons — and spoken at many smaller internal party
gatherings. In early February 1921 he would speak at the biggest
meeting so far — over 6,000 people in the Zircus Krone, which could
accommodate the largest indoor crowds in Munich. Until mid-1921
he spoke mainly in Munich, where the propaganda and organization
of the meetings would ensure a satisfactory turn-out, and where the
right atmosphere was guaranteed. But, not counting the speeches
made during a fortnight’s visit to Austria in early October, he held
ten speeches outside the city in 1920, including one in Rosenheim
where the first local group of the party outside Munich had just
been founded. It was largely owing to Hitler’s public profile that the
party membership increased sharply from 190 in January 1920 to
2,000 by the end of the year and 3,300 by August 1921. He was
rapidly making himself indispensable to the movement.

Hitler spoke from rough notes — mainly a series of jotted headings
with key words underlined. As a rule, a speech would last around
two hours or more. In the Festsaal of the Hofbrauhaus he used a
beer table on one of the long sides of the hall as his platform in
order to be in the middle of the crowd — a novel technique for a
speaker which helped create what Hitler regarded as a special mood
in that hall. The themes of his speeches varied little: the contrast of
Germany’s strength in a glorious past with its current weakness and
national humiliation — a sick state in the hands of traitors and
cowards who had betrayed the Fatherland to its powerful enemies;
the reasons for the collapse in a lost war unleashed by these
enemies, and behind them, the Jews; betrayal and revolution
brought about by criminals and Jews; English and French intentions
of destroying Germany, as shown in the Treaty of Versailles — the
‘Peace of shame’, the instrument of Germany’s slavery; the

exploitation of ordinary Germans by Jewish racketeers and
profiteers; a cheating and corrupt government and party system
presiding over economic misery, social division, political conflict,
and ethical collapse; the only way to recovery contained in the
points of the party’s programme -— ruthless showdown with internal
enemies and build-up of national consciousness and unity, leading to
renewed strength and eventual restored greatness. The combination
of traditional Bavarian dislike of the Prussians and the experience of
the Raterepublik in Munich meant that Hitler’s repeated onslaught
on the ‘Marxist’ government in Berlin was certain to meet with an
enthusiastic response among the still small minority of the local
population drawn to his meetings.

While Hitler basically appealed to negative feelings — anger,
resentment, hatred — there was also a ‘positive’ element in the
proposed remedy to the proclaimed ills. However platitudinous, the
appeal to restoration of liberty through national unity, the need to
collaborate of ‘workers of the brain and hand’, the social harmony
of a ‘national community’, and the protection of the ‘little man’
through the crushing of his exploiters, were, to go from the
applause they invariably produced, undeniably attractive
propositions to Hitler’s audiences. And Hitler’s own passion and
fervour successfully conveyed the message — to those already
predisposed to it — that no other way was possible; that Germany’s
revival would and could be brought about; and that it lay in the
power of ordinary Germans to make it happen through their own
struggle, sacrifice, and will. The effect was more that of a religious
revivalist meeting than a normal political gathering.

Though Hitler was invariably up-to-date in finding easy targets in
the daily politics of the crisis-ridden Republic, his main themes were
tediously repetitive. Some, in fact, often taken for granted to be
part of Hitler’s allegedly unchanging ideology, were missing
altogether at this stage. There was, for example, not a single
mention of the need for ‘living space’ (Lebensraum) in eastern
Europe. Britain and France were the foreign-policy targets at this
time. Indeed, Hitler jotted among the notes of one of his speeches,

in August 1920, ‘brotherhood towards the east’. Nor did he clamour
for a dictatorship. Such a demand occurs only in one speech in 1920,
on 27 April, in which Hitler declared that Germany needed ‘a
dictator who is a genius’ if it were to rise up again. There was no
implication that he himself was that person. Surprisingly, too, his
first outright public assault on Marxism did not occur before his
speech at Rosenheim on 21 July 1920 (though he had spoken on a
number of occasions before this of the catastrophic effects of
Bolshevism in Russia, for which he blamed the Jews). And,
remarkably, even race theory — where Hitler drew heavily for his
ideas from well-known antisemitic tracts such as Houston Stewart
Chamberlain, Adolf Wahrmund, and, especially, the arch-
popularizer Theodor Fritsch (one of whose emphases was the
alleged sexual abuse of women by Jews) — was explicitly treated in
only one speech by Hitler during 1920.

This scarcely meant, however, that Hitler neglected to attack the
Jews. On the contrary: the all-devouring manic obsession with the
Jews to which all else is subordinated — not observable before 1919,
never absent thereafter — courses through almost every Hitler
speech at this time. Behind all evil that had befallen or was
threatening Germany stood the figure of the Jew. In speech after
speech he lashed the Jews in the most vicious and barbaric language
imaginable.

Genuine socialism, declared Hitler, meant to be an antisemite.
Germans should be ready to enter into a pact with the devil to
eradicate the evil of Jewry. But, as in his letter to Gemlich the
previous autumn, he did not see emotional antisemitism as the
answer. He demanded internment in concentration camps to prevent
‘Jewish undermining of our people’, hanging for racketeers, but
ultimately, as the only solution — similar to the Gemlich letter — the
‘removal of the Jews from our people’. The implication, as in his
explicit demands with regard to Ostjuden (usually poor refugees
from persecution in eastern Europe), was their expulsion from
Germany. This was undoubtedly how it was understood. But the
language itself was both terrible and implicitly genocidal in its

biological similes. ‘Don’t think that you can combat racial
tuberculosis,’ he declared in August 1920, ‘without seeing to it that
the people is freed from the causative organ of racial tuberculosis.
The impact of Jewry will never pass away, and the poisoning of the
people will not end, as long as the causal agent, the Jew, is not
removed from our midst.’

His audiences loved it. More than anything else, these attacks
evoked torrents of applause and cheering. His technique — beginning
slowly, plenty of sarcasm, personalized attacks on named targets,
then a gradual crescendo to a climax — whipped his audiences into a
frenzy. His speech in the Festsaal of the Hofbrauhaus on 13 August
1920 on ‘Why are we Antisemites?’ — his only speech that year solely
relating to the Jews and probably intended as a basic statement on
the topic — was interrupted fifty-eight times during its two hours’
duration by ever wilder cheering from the 2,000-strong audience.
To go from a report on another Hitler speech a few weeks later, the
audience would have been mainly drawn from white-collar workers,
the lower-middle class, and better-off workers, with around a
quarter women.

At first, Hitler’s antisemitic tirades were invariably linked to anti-
capitalism and attacks on ‘Jewish’ war profiteers and racketeers,
whom he blamed for exploiting the German people and causing the
loss of the war and the German war dead. The influence of Gottfried
Feder can be seen in the distinction Hitler drew between essentially
healthy ‘industrial capital’ and the real evil of ‘Jewish finance
capital’.

There was no link with Marxism or Bolshevism at this stage.
Contrary to what is sometimes claimed, Hitler’s antisemitism was
not prompted by his anti-Bolshevism; it long predated it. There was
no mention of Bolshevism in the Gemlich letter of September 1919,
where the ‘Jewish Question’ is related to the rapacious nature of
finance capital. Hitler spoke in April and again in June 1920 of
Russia being destroyed by the Jews, but it was only in his
Rosenheim speech on 21 July that he explicitly married the images
of Marxism, Bolshevism, and the Soviet system in Russia to the

brutality of Jewish rule, for which he saw Social Democracy
preparing the ground in Germany. Hitler admitted in August 1920
that he knew little of the real situation in Russia. But — perhaps
influenced above all by Alfred Rosenberg, who came from the Baltic
and had experienced the Russian Revolution at first hand, but
probably also soaking up images of the horror of the Russian civil
war which were filtering through to the German press — he plainly
became preoccupied with Bolshevik Russia in the second half of the
year. The dissemination of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion — the
forgery about Jewish world domination, widely read and believed
in antisemitic circles at the time — probably also helped to focus
Hitler’s attention on Russia. These images appear to have provided
the catalyst to the merger of antisemitism and anti-Marxism in his
‘world-view’ — an identity which, once forged, never disappeared.

Hitler’s speeches put him on the political map in Munich. But he
was still very much a local taste. And however much noise he made,
his party was still insignificant compared with the established
socialist and Catholic parties. Moreover, though it is going too far
to see him as no more than the tool of powerful vested interests
‘behind the scenes’, without influential backers and the ‘connections’
they could provide his talents as a mob-agitator would not have got
him very far.

Though Hitler had already signalled his intention of making a
living as a political speaker, he was, in fact, until 31 March 1920
still drawing pay from the army. His first patron, Captain Mayr,
continued to take a close interest in him and, if his later account can
be believed, provided limited funding towards the staging of the
mass meetings. At this time, Hitler was still serving both the party
and the army. In January and February 1920, Mayr had ‘Herr
Hittler’ lecturing on ‘Versailles’ and ‘Political Parties and their
Significance’ in the company of distinguished Munich historians Karl
Alexander von Miller and Paul Joachimsen to Reichswehr soldiers

undertaking ‘citizenship education courses’. In March, during the
Kapp Putsch, when a short-lived armed coup had attempted to
overthrow the government, forcing it to flee from the Reich capital,
he sent him with Dietrich Eckart to Berlin to instruct Wolfgang
Kapp on the situation in Bavaria. They arrived too late. The Right’s
first attempt to take over the state had already collapsed. But Mayr
was undeterred. He retained both his contact with Kapp and his
interest in Hitler. He still had hopes, so he told Kapp six months
later, that the NSDAP - which he thought of as his own creation —
would become the ‘organization of national radicalism’, the
advance-guard of a future, more successful, putsch. He wrote to
Kapp, now exiled in Sweden:

The national workers’ party must provide the basis for the strong assault-force that we are
hoping for. The programme is still somewhat clumsy and also perhaps incomplete. We'll
have to supplement it. Only one thing is certain: that under this banner we’ve already won
a good number of supporters. Since July of last year ’ve been looking ... to strengthen the
movement ... I’ve set up very capable young people. A Herr Hitler, for example, has become
a motive force, a popular speaker of the first rank. In the Munich branch we have over
2,000 members, compared with under 100 in summer 1919.

Early in 1920, before Hitler had left the Reichswehr, Mayr had
taken him along to meetings of the ‘Iron Fist’ club for radical
nationalist officers, founded by Captain Ernst Rohm. Hitler had been
introduced to Rohm by Mayr, probably the previous autumn.
Interested in a variety of nationalist parties, particularly with a
view to winning the workers to the nationalist cause, Rohm had
attended the first meeting of the DAP addressed by Hitler on 16
October 1919 and had joined the party shortly afterwards. Now
Hitler came into far closer contact with Rohm, who rapidly came to
replace Mayr as the key link with the Reichswehr. Rohm had been
responsible for arming the volunteers and ‘civil defence’
(Einwohnerwehr) units in Bavaria and had in the meantime become
an important player in paramilitary politics, with excellent
connections in the army, the ‘patriotic associations’, and throughout
the volkisch Right. He was, in fact, at this time, along with his
fellow officers on the Right, far more interested in the massive
Einwohnerwehren, with a membership of over quarter of a million

men, than he was in the tiny NSDAP. Even so, he provided the key
contact between the NSDAP and the far larger ‘patriotic
associations’ and offered avenues to funding which the constantly
hard-up party desperately needed. His connections proved
invaluable — increasingly so from 1921 onwards, when his interest
in Hitler’s party grew.

Another important patron at this time was the volkisch poet and
publicist Dietrich Eckart. More than twenty years older than Hitler,
Eckart, who had initially made his name with a German adaptation
of Peer Gynt, had not been notably successful before the war as a
poet and critic. Possibly this stimulated his intense antisemitism. He
became politically active in December 1918 with the publication of
his antisemitic weekly Auf gut Deutsch (In Plain German), which also
featured contributions from Gottfried Feder and the young émigré
from the Baltic, Alfred Rosenberg. He spoke at DAP meetings in the
summer of 1919, before Hitler joined, and evidently came to regard
the party’s new recruit as his own protégé. Hitler himself was
flattered by the attention paid to him by a figure of Eckart’s
reputation in volkisch circles. In the early years, relations between
the two were good, even close. But for Hitler, as ever, it was
Eckart’s usefulness that counted. As Hitler’s self-importance grew,
his need for Eckart declined and by 1923, the year of Eckart’s death,
the two had become estranged.

At first, however, there could be no doubt of Eckart’s value to
Hitler and the NSDAP. Through his well-heeled connections, Eckart
afforded the beerhall demagogue an entrée into Munich ‘society’,
opening for him the door to the salons of the wealthy and
influential members of the city’s bourgeoisie. And through his
financial support, and that of his contacts, he was able to offer vital
assistance to the financially struggling small party. Since
membership fees did not remotely cover outgoings, the party was
dependent upon help from outside. It came in part from the owners
of Munich firms and businesses. Some aid continued to come from
the Reichswehr. But Eckart’s role was crucial. He arranged, for
example, the funding from his friend, the Augsburg chemist and

factory-owner Dr Gottfried Grandel, who also backed the periodical
Auf gut Deutsch, for the plane that took him and Hitler to Berlin at
the time of the Kapp Putsch. Grandel later served as a guarantor for
the funds used to purchase the Volkischer Beobachter and turn it into
the party’s own newspaper in December 1920.

To the Munich public, by 1921, Hitler was the NSDAP. He was its
voice, its representative figure, its embodiment. Asked to name the
party’s chairman, perhaps even politically informed citizens might
have guessed wrongly. But Hitler did not want the chairmanship.
Drexler offered it him on a number of occasions. Each time Hitler
refused. Drexler wrote to Feder in spring 1921, stating ‘that each
revolutionary movement must have a dictatorial head, and
therefore I also think our Hitler is the most suitable for our
movement, without wanting to be pushed into the background
myself’. But for Hitler, the party chairmanship meant organizational
responsibility. He had — this was to remain the case during the rise
to power, and when he headed the German state — neither aptitude
nor ability for organizational matters. Organization he could leave
to others; propaganda — mobilization of the masses — was what he
was good at, and what he wanted to do. For that, and that alone, he
would take responsibility. Propaganda, for Hitler, was the highest
form of political activity.

In Hitler’s own conception, propaganda was the key to the
nationalization of the masses, without which there could be no
national salvation. It was not that propaganda and ideology were
distinctive entities for him. They were inseparable, and reinforced
each other. An idea for Hitler was useless unless it mobilized. The
self-confidence he gained from the rapturous reception of his
speeches assured him that his diagnosis of Germany’s ills and the
way to national redemption was right — the only one possible. This
in turn gave him the self-conviction that conveyed itself to those in
his immediate entourage as well as those listening to his speeches in
the beerhalls. To see himself as ‘drummer’ of the national cause
was, therefore, for Hitler a high calling. It was why, before the
middle of 1921, he preferred to be free for this role, and not to be

bogged down in the organizational work which he associated with
the chairmanship of the party.

The outrage felt throughout Germany at the punitive sum of 226
thousand million Gold Marks to be paid in reparations, imposed by
the Paris Conference at the end of January 1921, ensured there
would be no let-up in agitation. This was the background for the
biggest meeting that the NSDAP had until then staged, on 3
February in the Circus Krone. Hitler risked going ahead with the
meeting at only one day’s notice, and without the usual advance
publicity. In a rush, the huge hall was booked and two lorries hired
to drive round the city throwing out leaflets. This was another
technique borrowed from the ‘Marxists’, and the first time the Nazis
had used it. Despite worries until the last minute that the hall would
be half-empty and the meeting would prove a propaganda debacle,
more than 6,000 turned up to hear Hitler, speaking on ‘Future or
Ruin’, denounce the ‘slavery’ imposed on Germans by the Allied
reparations, and castigate the weakness of the government for
accepting them.

Hitler wrote that after the Zircus Krone success he increased the
NSDAP’s propaganda activity in Munich still further. And indeed the
propaganda output was impressive. Hitler spoke at twenty-eight
major meetings in Munich and twelve elsewhere (nearly all still in
Bavaria), apart from several contributions to ‘discussions’, and
seven addresses to the newly-formed SA in the latter part of the
year. Between January and June he also wrote thirty-nine articles
for the Volkischer Beobachter, and from September onwards
contributed a number of pieces to the party’s internal information
leaflets. Of course, he had the time in which to devote himself
solely to propaganda. Unlike the other members of the party
leadership, he had no other occupation or interest.

Politics consumed practically his entire existence. When he was
not giving speeches, or preparing them, he spent time reading. As
always, much of this was the newspapers — giving him regular
ammunition for his scourge of Weimar politicians. He had books - a
lot of them popular editions — on history, geography, Germanic

myths, and, especially, war (including Clausewitz) on the shelves of
his shabby, sparsely-furnished room at 41 Thierschstraf{§e, down by
the Isar. But what, exactly, he read is impossible to know. His
lifestyle scarcely lent itself to lengthy periods of systematic reading.
He claimed, however, to have read up on his hero Frederick the
Great, and pounced on the work of his rival in the volkisch camp,
Otto Dickel, a 320-page treatise on Die Auferstehung des Abendlandes
(The Resurrection of the Western World) immediately on its
appearance in 1921 in order to be able to castigate it.

Otherwise, as it had been since the Vienna days, much of his time
was spent lounging around cafés in Munich. He specially liked the
Café Heck in Galerienstrafse, his favourite. In a quiet corner of the
long, narrow room of this coffee-house, frequented by Munich’s
solid middle class, he could sit at his reserved table, his back to the
wall, holding court among the new-found cronies that he had
attracted to the NSDAP. Among those coming to form an inner
circle of Hitler’s associates were the young student Rudolf HefS, the
Baltic-Germans Alfred Rosenberg (who had worked on Eckart’s
periodical since 1919) and Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter (an
engineer with excellent contacts to wealthy Russian émigrés).
Certainly by the time Putzi Hanfstaengl, the cultured part-American
who became his Foreign Press Chief, came to know him, late in
1922, Hitler had a table booked every Monday evening at the old-
fashioned Café Neumaier on the edge of the Viktualienmarkt. His
regular accompaniment formed a motley crew — mostly lower-
middle class, some unsavoury characters among them. Christian
Weber, a former horse-dealer, who, like Hitler, invariably carried a
dog-whip and relished the brawls with Communists, was one.
Another was Hermann Esser, formerly Mayr’s press agent, himself
an excellent agitator, and an even better gutter-journalist. Max
Amann, another roughneck, Hitler’s former sergeant who became
overlord of the Nazi press empire, was also usually there, as were
Ulrich Graf, Hitler’s personal bodyguard, and, frequently, the
‘philosophers’ of the party, Gottfried Feder and Dietrich Eckart. In
the long room, with its rows of benches and tables, often occupied

by elderly couples, Hitler’s entourage would discuss politics, or
listen to his monologues on art and architecture, while eating the
snacks they had brought with them and drinking their litres of beer
or cups of coffee. At the end of the evening, Weber, Amann, Graf,
and Lieutenant Klintzsch, a paramilitary veteran of the Kapp Putsch,
would act as a bodyguard, escorting Hitler - wearing the long black
overcoat and trilby that ‘gave him the appearance of a conspirator’
— back to his apartment in Thierschstrafte.

Hitler scarcely cut the figure of a mainstream politician. Not
surprisingly, the Bavarian establishment regarded him largely with
contempt. But they could not ignore him. The old-fashioned
monarchist head of the Bavarian government at the time, Minister
President Gustav Ritter von Kahr, who had assumed office on 16
March 1920 following the Kapp Putsch and aimed to turn Bavaria
into a ‘cell of order’ representing true national values, thought
Hitler was a propagandist and nothing more. This was a not
unjustifiable assessment at the time. But Kahr was keen to gather
‘national forces’ in Bavaria in protest at the ‘fulfilment policy’ of
Reich Chancellor Wirth. And he felt certain that he could make use
of Hitler, that he could control the ‘impetuous Austrian’. On 14 May
1921 he invited a delegation from the NSDAP, led by Hitler, to
discuss the political situation with him. It was the first meeting of
the two men whose identical aim of destroying the new Weimar
democracy was to link them, if fleetingly, in the ill-fated putsch of
November 1923 - a chequered association that would end with
Kahr’s murder in the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ at the end of June
1934. Whatever Kahr’s disdain for Hitler, his invitation to a meeting
in May 1921 amounted to recognition that the latter was now a
factor in Bavarian politics, proof that he and his movement had to
be taken seriously.

Rudolf Hefg, still studying at Munich under the geopolitician
Professor Karl Haushofer, introverted and idealistic, and already
besotted with Hitler, was part of the delegation. Three days later,
unsolicited and unprompted by Hitler, he wrote a lengthy letter to
Kahr, describing Hitler’s early life and eulogizing about his political

aims, ideals, and skills. Hitler, he wrote, was ‘an unusually decent,
sincere character, full of kind-heartedness, religious, a good
Catholic’, with only one aim: ‘the welfare of his country’. Hef§ went
on to laud Hitler’s self-sacrifice in this cause, how he received not a
penny from the movement itself but made his living purely from the
fees he received for other speeches he occasionally made.

This was the official line that Hitler himself had put out the
previous September in the Volkischer Beobachter. It was quite
disingenuous. On no more than a handful of occasions, he claimed,
did he speak at nationalist meetings other than those of the NSDAP.
The fees from these alone would certainly not have been enough to
keep body and soul together. Rumours about his income and
lifestyle were avidly taken up on the Left. Even on the volkisch
Right there were remarks about him being chauffeured around
Munich in a big car, and his enemies in the party raised questions
about his personal financial irregularities and the amount of time
the ‘king of Munich’ spent in an expensive lifestyle cavorting with
women — even women smoking cigarettes. In fact, Hitler was
distinctly touchy about his financial affairs. He repeated in court in
December 1921 in a libel case against the socialist Muinchener Post
that he had sought no fees from the party for sixty-five speeches
delivered in Munich. But he accepted that he was ‘supported in a
modest way’ by party members and ‘occasionally’ provided with
meals by them. One of those who looked after him was the first
‘Hitler-Mutti’, Frau Hermine Hofmann, the elderly widow of a
headmaster, who plied Hitler with endless offerings of cakes and
turned her house at Solln on the outskirts of Munich for a while into
a sort of unofficial party headquarters. A little later the Reichsbahn
official Theodor Laubock — founder of the Rosenheim branch of the
NSDAP, but subsequently transferred to Munich — and his wife saw
to Hitler’s well-being, and could also be called upon to put up
important guests of the party. In reality, the miserable
accommodation Hitler rented in Thierschstrafge, and the shabby
clothes he wore, belied the fact that even at this date he was not
short of well-to-do party supporters. With the growth of the party

and his own expanding reputation in 1922-3, he was able to gain
new and wealthy patrons in Munich high society.

The party was, however, perpetually short of money. It was on a
fundraising mission in June 1921 to Berlin by Hitler, to try (in the
company of the man with the contacts, Dietrich Eckart) to find
backing for the ailing Volkischer Beobachter, that the crisis which
culminated in Hitler’s take-over of the party leadership unfolded.

The background was shaped by moves to merge the NSDAP with
the rival German-Socialist Party, the DSP. To go from the party
programmes, despite some differences of accent, the two volkisch
parties had more in common than separated them. And the DSP had
a following in north Germany, which the Nazi Party, still scarcely
more than a small local party, lacked. In itself, therefore, there was
certainly an argument for joining forces. Talks about a possible
merger had begun the previous August in a gathering in Salzburg,
attended by Hitler, of national socialist parties from Germany,
Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. A number of overtures
followed from the DSP leaders between then and April 1921. At a
meeting in Zeitz in Thuringia at the end of March, Drexler -
presumably delegated by the NSDAP, but plainly in the teeth of
Hitler’s disapproval — even agreed to tentative proposals for a
merger and — anathema to Hitler — a move of the party
headquarters to Berlin. Hitler responded with fury to Drexler’s
concessions, threatened to resign from the party, and succeeded
‘amid unbelievable anger’ in reversing the agreement reached at
Zeitz. Eventually, at a meeting in Munich in mid-April, amidst great
rancour and with Hitler in a towering rage, negotiations with the
DSP collapsed. The DSP was in no doubt that Hitler, the ‘fanatical
would-be big shot’, whose successes had gone to his head, was
solely responsible for the NSDAP’s obstructionism. Hitler, dismissive
of notions of a specific political programme to be implemented,
interested only in agitation and mobilization, had set his face rigidly

from the outset against any possible merger. To Hitler, the
similarities in programme were irrelevant. He objected to the way
the DSP had rushed to set up numerous branches without solid
foundations, so that the party was ‘everywhere and nowhere’, and
to its readiness to resort to parliamentary tactics. But the real
reason was a different one. Any merger was bound to threaten his
supremacy in the small but tightly-knit NSDAP.

Though the merger with the DSP had been fended off for the time
being, an even bigger threat, from Hitler’s point of view, arose
while he was away in Berlin. Dr Otto Dickel, who had founded in
March 1921 in Augsburg another volkisch organization, the
Deutsche Werkgemeinschaft, had made something of a stir on the
volkisch scene with his book Die Auferstehung des Abendlandes (The
Resurrection of the Western World). Dickel’s mystic volkisch
philosophizing was not Hitler’s style, and, not surprisingly, met
with the latter’s contempt and angry dismissal. But some of Dickel’s
ideas — building up a classless community through national renewal,
combating ‘Jewish domination’ through the struggle against
‘interest slavery’ — bore undeniable similarities to those of both the
NSDAP and the DSP. And Dickel, no less than Hitler, had the
conviction of a missionary and, moreover, was also a dynamic and
popular public speaker. Following the appearance of his book,
which was lauded in the Volkischer Beobachter, he was invited to
Munich, and — with Hitler absent in Berlin — proved a major success
before a packed audience in one of Hitler’s usual haunts, the
Hofbrauhaus. Other speeches were planned for Dickel. The NSDAP’s
leadership was delighted to find in him a second ‘outstanding
speaker with a popular touch’.

Hitler, meanwhile, was still in Berlin. He failed to turn up at a
meeting with a DSP representative on 1 July for further merger
talks, and did not return to Bavaria until ten days later. He had
evidently by then got wind of the alarming news that a delegation
of the NSDAP’s leaders was due to have talks there with Dickel and
representatives of the Augsburg and Nuremberg branches of the
Deutsche Werkgemeinschaft. He appeared before the NSDAP

delegates themselves arrived, beside himself with rage, threatening
the Augsburg and Nuremberg representatives that he would see that
a merger was stopped. But when his own people eventually turned
up, his uncontrolled fury subsided into sulky silence. Three hours of
suggestions from Dickel for the formation of a loose confederation
of the different groups and recommendations for improvements to
the NSDAP’s programme prompted numerous outbursts from Hitler
before, being able to stand it no longer, he stormed out of the
meeting.

If Hitler hoped his tantrums would convince his colleagues to
drop the negotiations, he was mistaken. They were embarrassed by
his behaviour and impressed by what Dickel had to offer. Even
Dietrich Eckart thought Hitler had behaved badly. It was accepted
that the party programme needed amending, and that Hitler ‘as a
simple man’ was not up to doing this. They agreed to take back
Dickel’s proposals to Munich and put them to the full party
committee.

Hitler resigned from the party in anger and disgust on 11 July. In
a letter to the committee three days later, he justified his move on
the grounds that the representatives in Augsburg had violated the
party statutes and acted against the wishes of the members in
handing over the movement to a man whose ideas were
incompatible with those of the NSDAP. ‘I will and can not be any
longer a member of such a movement,’ he declared. Hitler had
resigned ‘for ever’ from the party’s committee in December 1920.
As noted, he threatened resignation yet again following the Zeitz
conference in late March 1921. The histrionics of the prima donna
were part and parcel of Hitler’s make-up — and would remain so. It
would always be the same: he only knew all-or-nothing arguments;
there was nothing in between, no possibility of reaching a
compromise. Always from a maximalist position, with no other way
out, he would go for broke. And if he could not get his way he
would throw a temper-tantrum and threaten to quit. In power, in
years to come, he would sometimes deliberately orchestrate an
outburst of rage as a bullying tactic. But usually his tantrums were a

sign of frustration, even desperation, not strength. It was to be the
case in a number of future crises. And it was so on this occasion.
The resignation was not a carefully planned manoeuvre to use his
position as the party’s star performer to blackmail the committee
into submission. It was an expression of fury and frustration at not
getting his own way. His threat of resignation had worked before,
after the Zeitz conference. Now he was risking his only trump card
again. Defeat would have meant the party’s amalgamation in
Dickel’s planned ‘Western League’ and left Hitler with only the
option — which he seems to have contemplated — of setting up a new
party and beginning again. There were those who would have been
glad, whatever his uses as an agitator, to have been rid of such a
troublesome and egocentric entity. And the spread of the party that
the merger with Dickel’s organization presented offered more than a
little compensation.

But the loss of its sole star performer would have been a major,
perhaps fatal, blow to the NSDAP. Hitler’s departure would have
split the party. In the end, this was the decisive consideration.
Dietrich Eckart was asked to intervene, and on 13 July Drexler
sought the conditions under which Hitler would agree to rejoin the
party. It was full capitulation from the party leadership. Hitler’s
conditions all stemmed from the recent turmoil in the party. His key
demands — to be accepted by an extraordinary members’ meeting —
were ‘the post of chairman with dictatorial power’; the party
headquarters to be fixed once and for all as Munich; the party
programme to be regarded as inviolate; and the end of all merger
attempts. All the demands centred upon securing Hitler’s position in
the party against any future challenges. A day later the party
committee expressed its readiness in recognition of his ‘immense
knowledge’, his services for the movement, and his ‘unusual talent
as a speaker’ to give him ‘dictatorial powers’. It welcomed his
willingness, having turned down Drexler’s offers in the past, now to
take over the party chairmanship. Hitler rejoined the party, as
member no.3680, on 26 July.

Even now the conflict was not fully at an end. While Hitler and
Drexler publicly demonstrated their unity at a members’ meeting on
26 July, Hitler’s opponents in the leadership had his henchman
Hermann Esser expelled from the party, prepared placards
denouncing Hitler, and printed 3,000 copies of an anonymous
pamphlet attacking him in the most denigratory terms as the agent
of sinister forces intent on damaging the party. But Hitler, who had
shown once more to great effect how irreplaceable he was as a
speaker in a meeting, packed to the last seat, in Circus Krone on 20
July, was now in the driving seat. Now there was no hesitancy. This
was Hitler triumphant. To tumultuous applause from the 554 paid-
up members attending the extraordinary members’ meeting in the
Festsaal of the Hofbrauhaus on 29 July, he defended himself and
Esser and rounded on his opponents. He boasted that he had never
sought party office, and had turned down the chairmanship on
several occasions. But this time he was prepared to accept. The new
party constitution, which Hitler had been forced to draft hurriedly,
confirmed on three separate occasions the sole responsibility of the
First Chairman for the party’s actions (subject only to the
membership meeting). There was only one vote against accepting
the new dictatorial powers over the party granted to Hitler. His
chairmanship was unanimously accepted.

The reform of the party statutes was necessary, stated the
Volkischer Beobachter, in order to prevent any future attempt to
dissipate the energies of the party through majority decisions. It
was the first step on transforming the NSDAP into a new-style
party, a ‘Fuhrer party’. The move had come about not through
careful planning, but through Hitler’s reaction to events which were
running out of his control. Rudolf Hefs’s subsequent assault on
Hitler’s opponents in the Volkischer Beobachter not only contained
the early seeds of the later heroization of Hitler, but also revealed
the initial base on which it rested. ‘Are you truly blind,’ wrote Hefs,
‘to the fact that this man is the leader personality who alone is able
to carry through the struggle? Do you think that without him the
masses would pile into the Circus Krone?’

5
The ‘Drummer’

Hitler was content in the early 1920s to be the ‘drummer’ —
whipping up the masses for the ‘national movement’. He saw
himself at this time not as portrayed in Mein Kampf, as Germany’s
future leader in waiting, the political messiah whose turn would
arise once the nation recognized his unique greatness. Rather, he
was paving the way for the great leader whose day might not dawn
for many years to come. ‘I am nothing more than a drummer and
rallier,’ he told the neo-conservative writer Arthur Moeller van den
Bruck in 1922. Some months earlier, he had reputedly stated, in an
interview in May 1921 with the chief editor of the Pan-German
newspaper Deutsche Zeitung, that he was not the leader and
statesman who would ‘save the Fatherland that was sinking into
chaos’, but only ‘the agitator who understood how to rally the
masses’. Nor, he allegedly went on, was he ‘the architect who
clearly pictured in his own eyes the plan and design of the new
building and with calm sureness and creativity was able to lay one
stone on the other. He needed the greater one behind him, on
whose command he could lean.’

To be the ‘drummer’ meant everything to Hitler at this time. It
was the ‘vocation’ that replaced his dreams of becoming a great
artist or architect. It was his main task, practically his sole concern.
Not only did it allow full expression to his one real talent. It was
also in his eyes the greatest and most important role he could play.
For politics to Hitler - and so it would in all essence remain — was
propaganda: ceaseless mass mobilization for a cause to be followed
blindly, not the ‘art of the possible’.

Hitler owed his rise to at least regional prominence on the
nationalist Right in Bavaria not simply to his unparalleled ability as
a mob-orator at mass meetings in Munich. As before, this was his
chief asset. But linked to this, and of crucial importance, was the
fact that he was the head of a movement which, in contrast to the
earliest phase of the party’s existence, now came to develop its own
substantial paramilitary force and to enter the maelstrom of
Bavarian paramilitary politics. It was above all in the peculiar
conditions of post-revolutionary Bavaria that the private armies,
with the toleration and often active support of the Bavarian
authorities, could fully flourish.

The vehemently anti-socialist, counter-revolutionary regime of
Minister President Gustav Ritter von Kahr turned Bavaria into a
haven for right-wing extremists from all over Germany, including
many under order of arrest elsewhere in the country. From a new
protected base in Munich, for example, Captain Hermann Ehrhardt,
a veteran of orchestrated anti-socialist violence in the Freikorps,
including the suppression of the Raterepublik, and a leader of the
Kapp Putsch, was able to use his Organisation Consul to build up a
network of groups throughout the whole of the German Reich and
carry out many of the political murders — there were 354 in all
perpetrated by the Right between 1919 and 1922 - that stained the
early years of the troubled new democracy. It was Ehrhardt,
alongside Ernst Rohm, who was to play a leading role in
establishing the NSDAP’s own paramilitary organization, which was
to emerge from 1921 onwards into a significant feature of the Nazi
Movement and an important factor in paramilitary politics in
Bavaria.

Rohm was, more even than Hitler, typical of the ‘front
generation’. As a junior officer, he shared the dangers, anxieties,
and privations of the troops in the trenches — shared, too, the
prejudice and mounting anger levelled at those in staff headquarters
behind the lines, at the military bureaucracy, at ‘incapable’
politicians, and at those seen as shirkers, idlers, and profiteers at
home. Against these highly negative images, he heroicized the ‘front

community’, the solidarity of the men in the trenches, leadership
resting on deeds rather than status, and the blind obedience that this
demanded. What he wanted was a new ‘warrior’ élite whose actions
and achievements had proved their right to rule. Though a
monarchist, there was for Rohm to be no return to pre-war
bourgeois society. His ideal was the community of fighting men. As
for so many who joined the Freikorps and their successor
paramilitary organizations, this ideal combined male fantasy with
the cult of violence. Like so many, ROhm had gone to war in 1914
in wild enthusiasm, suffered serious facial injury within weeks when
shell fragments tore away part of his nose, permanently disfiguring
him, had returned to lead his company, but had been forced out of
service at the front after being again badly injured at Verdun. His
subsequent duties in the Bavarian War Ministry, and as the supply
officer of a division, sharpened his political antennae and gave him
experience in organizational matters. The trauma of defeat and
revolution drove him into counter-revolutionary activity — including
service in the Freikorps Epp during its participation in the crushing
of the Raterepublik. After brief membership of the German
Nationalists, the DNVP, he joined the tiny DAP soon after Hitler, in
autumn 1919, and, as he himself claimed, was probably responsible
for others from the Reichswehr entering the party. Rohm’s interest
continued, however, to be dictated by military and paramilitary,
rather than party, politics. He showed no exclusive interest in the
NSDAP before the SA became a significant element in paramilitary
politics.

But Rohm’s value to the party in engineering its paramilitary
connections is hard to overrate. His access both to leading figures
on the paramilitary scene and, especially, to weaponry was crucial.
His position in control of weapon supplies for the Brigade Epp (the
successor to the Freikorps unit, now integrated into the Reichswehr)
gave him responsibility for providing the Einwohnerwehr with
weapons. The semi-secrecy involved in concealing the extent of
weaponry from Allied control — not difficult since there was no
occupying army to carry out inspections — also gave Rohm a great

deal of scope to build up a large stockpile of mainly small arms in
1920-21. After the dissolution of the Einwohnerwehr, and the
official confiscation of weaponry, various paramilitary organizations
entrusted him with their weapon supplies. Presiding over such an
arsenal, deciding when and if weapons should be handed out, the
‘machine-gun king’, as he became known, was thus in a pivotal
position with regard to the demands of all paramilitary
organizations. And, through the protection he gained from Epp,
Kahr, and the Munich political police, he enjoyed influence beyond
his rank on the politics of the nationalist Right.

From the beginning, the dual role of paramilitary organization
(initially linked to Ehrhardt) and party shock troops under Hitler’s
leadership contained the seeds of the tension that was to accompany
the SA down to 1934. The interest of Rohm and Ehrhardt lay on the
paramilitary side. Hitler tried to integrate the SA fully into the
party, though organizationally it retained considerable
independence before 1924. The build-up of the SA was steady, not
spectacular, before the second half of 1922. It was after that date, in
conditions of rapidly mounting crisis in Bavaria and in the Reich,
that the SA’s numbers swelled, making it a force to be reckoned
with on the nationalist Right.

Hitler, meanwhile, now undisputed leader of his party, carried on
his ceaseless agitation much as before, able to exploit the continued
tension between Bavaria and the Reich. The murder of Reich
Finance Minister Matthias Erzberger on 26 August 1921 — an
indication of the near-anarchism that still prevailed in Germany —
and Kahr’s refusal to accept the validity for Bavaria of the state of
emergency declared by Reich President Friedrich Ebert, kept things
on the boil. Material discontent played its own part. Prices were
already rising sharply as the currency depreciated. Foodstuffs were
almost eight times more expensive in 1921 than they had been at
the end of the war. By the next year they would be over 130 times
dearer. And that was before the currency lost all its value in the
hyperinflation of 1923.

Hitler’s provocation of his political enemies and of the authorities
to gain publicity was stepped up. After one violent clash between
his followers and his opponents, he was sentenced in January 1922
to three months’ imprisonment for breach of the peace — two
months suspended against future good behaviour (though
conveniently forgotten about when the good behaviour did not
materialize). Even his powerful friends could not prevent him
serving the other month of his sentence. Between 24 June and 27
July 1922 he took up residence in Stadelheim prison in Munich.

Apart from this short interlude, Hitler did not let up with his
agitation. Brushes with the police were commonplace. For Hitler,
these violent clashes with his opponents were the lifeblood of his
movement. They were above all good for publicity. Hitler was still
dissatisfied with the coverage — even of a negative kind — he
received in the press. Nevertheless, the actions of the NSDAP and its
leader ensured that they remained in the public eye. And while his
leading supporters hinted darkly at dire consequences if the
Bavarian government expelled him from Germany (as he had been
warned might happen if the disturbances continued), Hitler made
propaganda capital out of the threat of expulsion by pointing to his
war record, when he had fought as a German for his country while
others had done no more than stay at home and preach politics.

Hitler’s most notable propaganda success in 1922 was his party’s
participation in the so-called ‘German Day’ (Deutscher Tag) in
Coburg on 14-15 October. Coburg, on the Thuringian border in the
north of Upper Franconia and part of Bavaria for only two years,
was virgin territory for the Nazis. He saw the German Day as an
opportunity not to be missed. He scraped together what funds the
NSDAP had to hire a special train — in itself a novel propaganda
stunt — to take 800 stormtroopers to Coburg. The SA men were
instructed by Hitler to ignore explicit police orders, banning a
formation march with unfurled banners and musical
accompaniment, and marched with hoisted swastika flags through
the town. Workers lining the streets insulted them and spat at them.
Nazis in turn leapt out of the ranks beating their tormentors with

sticks and rubber-truncheons. A furious battle with the socialists
ensued. After ten minutes of mayhem, in which they had police
support, the stormtroopers triumphantly claimed the streets of
Coburg as theirs. For Hitler, the propaganda victory was what
counted. The German Day in Coburg went down in the party’s
annals. The NSDAP had made its mark in northern Bavaria.

It was Hitler’s second major success in Franconia within a few
days. On 8 October, Julius Streicher, head of the Nuremberg branch
of the Deutsche Werkgemeinschaft, had written to Hitler offering to
take his sizeable following, together with his newspaper the
Deutscher Volkswille, into the NSDAP. In the wake of the Coburg
triumph, the transfer took place on 20 October. Streicher, a short,
squat, shaven-headed bully, born in 1885 in the Augsburg area, for
a time a primary school teacher as his father had been, and, like
Hitler, a war veteran decorated with the Iron Cross, First Class, was
utterly possessed by demonic images of Jews. Shortly after the war
he had been an early member of the DSP (German-Socialist Party),
as antisemitic as the NSDAP, though he had left it in 1921. His
newspaper Der Sturmer, established in 1923 and becoming notorious
for its obscene caricatures of evil-looking Jews seducing pure
German maidens and ritual-murder allegations, would — despite
Hitler’s personal approving comments, and view that ‘the Jew’ was
far worse than Streicher’s ‘idealized’ picture — for a while be banned
even in the Third Reich. Streicher was eventually tried at
Nuremberg, and hanged. Now, back in 1922, in a step of vital
importance for the development of the NSDAP in Franconia, in the
northern regions of Bavaria, he subordinated himself personally to
Hitler. The rival volkisch movement was fatally weakened in
Franconia. The Nazi Party practically doubled its membership. From
around 2,000 members about the beginning of 1921 and 6,000 a
year later, the party was overnight some 20,000 strong. More than
that: the Franconian countryside — piously Protestant, fervently
nationalist, and stridently antisemitic — was to provide the NSDAP
with a stronghold far greater than was offered by its home city of
Munich in the Catholic south of Bavaria, and a symbolic capital in

Nuremberg -— later designated the ‘city of the Reich Party Rallies’. It
was little wonder that Hitler was keen to express his gratitude to
Streicher publicly in Mein Kampf.

Even so, it was striking that, away from his Munich citadel,
Hitler’s power was still limited. He was the undisputed propaganda
champion of the party. But away from his Munich base, his writ still
did not always run.

This was in itself ample reason for the interest which his Munich
following began to show in building up the leadership cult around
Hitler. A significant boost to the aura of a man of destiny attaching
itself to Hitler came from outside Germany. Mussolini’s so-called
‘March on Rome’ on 28 October 1922 — fictitious though it was in
the Fascist legend of a bold ‘seizure of power’ — nevertheless deeply
stirred the Nazi Party. It suggested the model of a dynamic and
heroic nationalist leader marching to the salvation of his strife-torn
country. The Duce provided an image to be copied. Less than a
week after the coup d’état in Italy, on 3 November 1922, Hermann
Esser proclaimed to a packed Festsaal in the Hofbrauhaus:
‘Germany’s Mussolini is called Adolf Hitler.’ It marked the symbolic
moment when Hitler’s followers invented the Fihrer cult.

The spread of fascist and militaristic ideas in post-war Europe
meant that ‘heroic leadership’ images were ‘in the air’ and by no
means confined to Germany. The emergence of the Duce cult in
Italy provides an obvious parallel. But the German images naturally
had their own flavour, drawing on particular elements of the
political culture of the nationalist Right. And the crisis-ridden nature
of the Weimar state, detested by so many powerful groups in
society and unable to win the popularity and support of the masses,
guaranteed that such ideas, which in a more stable environment
might have been regarded with derision and confined to the lunatic
fringe of politics, were never short of a hearing. Ideas put into
circulation by neo-conservative publicists, writers, and intellectuals
were, in more vulgarized form, taken up in paramilitary formations
and in the varied groupings of the bourgeois youth movement. The
model of Mussolini’s triumph in Italy now offered the opening for

such ideas to be incorporated into the vision of national revival
preached by the National Socialists.

The Fuhrer cult was not yet the pivot of the party’s ideology and
organization. But the beginnings of a conscious public profiling of
Hitler’s leadership qualities by his entourage, with strong hints in
his own speeches, dates back to the period following Mussolini’s
‘March on Rome’. Hitler was beginning to attract fawning excesses
of adulation — even stretching to grotesque comparisons with
Napoleon — from admirers on the nationalist Right. The ground for
the later rapid spread of the Fuhrer cult was already well fertilized.

There had been no trace of a leadership cult in the first years of
the Nazi Party. The word ‘leader’ (‘Fuhrer’) had no special meaning
attached to it. Every political party or organization had a leader —
or more than one. The NSDAP was no different. Drexler was
referred to as the party’s ‘Fuhrer’, as was Hitler; or sometimes both
in practically the same breath. Once Hitler had taken over the party
leadership in July 1921, the term ‘our leader’ (‘unser Fuhrer’)
became gradually more common. But its meaning was still
interchangeable with the purely functional ‘chairman of the NSDAP’.
There was nothing ‘heroic’ about it. Nor had Hitler endeavoured to
build up a personality cult around himself. But Mussolini’s triumph
evidently made a deep impression on him. It gave him a role-model.
Referring to Mussolini, less than a month after the ‘March on
Rome’, Hitler reportedly stated: ‘So will it be with us. We only have
to have the courage to act. Without struggle, no victory!’ However,
the reshaping of his self-image also reflected how his supporters
were beginning to see their leader. His followers portrayed him, in
fact, as Germany’s ‘heroic’ leader before he came to see himself in
that light. Not that he did anything to discourage the new way he
was being portrayed from autumn 1922 onwards. It was in
December 1922 that the Volkischer Beobachter for the first time
appeared to claim that Hitler was a special kind of leader — indeed
the Leader for whom Germany was waiting. Followers of Hitler
leaving a parade in Munich were said ‘to have found something
which millions are yearning for, a leader’. By Hitler’s thirty-fourth

birthday, on 20 April 1923, when the new head of the SA, Hermann
Goring — thirty years old, Bavarian born but at the latest from the
time of his military training in Berlin a self-styled Prussian,
handsome (at this time), wildly egocentric, well-connected and
power-hungry, bringing the glamour of the World War decorated
flying ace as well as important links to the aristocracy to the Nazi
Movement -— labelled him the ‘beloved leader of the German
freedom-movement’, the personality cult was unmistakable.
Political opponents scorned it. That it was not without its mark on
Hitler himself is plain. Eckart told Hanfstaengl, while on holiday
with Hitler near Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian alps bordering on
Austria in May 1923, that Hitler had ‘megalomania halfway
between a Messiah complex and Neroism’, after he had allegedly
compared the way he would deal with Berlin with Christ throwing
money-changers out of the temple.

During 1923 there are indications in Hitler’s speeches that his
self-perception was changing. He was now much more preoccupied
than he had been in earlier years with leadership, and the qualities
needed in the coming Leader of Germany. At no time before his
imprisonment in Landsberg did he unambiguously claim those
qualities for himself. But a number of passages in his speeches hint
that the edges of what distinguished the ‘drummer’ from the
‘Leader’ might be starting to blur.

On 4 May 1923, in a speech castigating the parliamentary system
as the ‘downfall and end of the German nation’, Hitler gave the
clearest hint to date of how he saw his own role. With reference to
Frederick the Great and Bismarck, ‘giants’ whose deeds contrasted
with those of the Reichstag, ‘Germany’s grave-digger’, he declared:
‘What can save Germany is the dictatorship of the national will and
national determination. The question arises: is the suitable
personality to hand? Our task is not to look for such a person. He is
a gift from heaven, or is not there. Our task is to create the sword
that this person will need when he is there. Our task is to give the
dictator, when he comes, a people ready for him!’

In an interview with the British Daily Mail on 2 October 1923,
Hitler was reported as saying: ‘If a German Mussolini is given to
Germany ... people would fall down on their knees and worship him
more than Mussolini has ever been worshipped.’ If he was seeing
himself — as his followers were seeing him — as the ‘German
Mussolini’, then he was apparently beginning to associate the
greatness of national leadership with his own person. He felt by this
time, so he said, ‘the call to Germany’s salvation within him’, and
others detected ‘outright Napoleonic and messianic allures’ in what
he said.

The lack of clarity in Hitler’s comments about the future
leadership was, in part, presumably tactical. There was nothing to
be gained by alienating possible support through a premature
conflict about who would later be supreme leader. As Hitler had
stated in October, the leadership question could be left unanswered
until ‘the weapon is created which the leader must possess’. Only
then would the time be ripe to ‘pray to our Lord God that he give us
the right leader’. But it was predominantly a reflection of Hitler’s
concept of politics as essentially agitation, propaganda, and
‘struggle’. Organizational forms remained of little concern to him as
long as his own freedom of action was not constrained by them. The
crucial issue was the leadership of the ‘political struggle’. But it is
hard to imagine that Hitler’s self-confidence in this field and his
ingrained refusal to compromise would not subsequently have
meant his demand for total, unconstrained leadership of the
‘national movement’. At any rate, Hitler’s comments on leadership
in the crisis-ridden year of 1923 seem to indicate that his self-image
was in a process of change. He still saw himself as the ‘drummer’,
the highest calling there was in his eyes. But it would not take
much, following his triumph in the trial, to convert that self-image
into the presumption that he was the ‘heroic leader’ himself.

That was all in the future. Around the beginning of 1923, few, if
any, outside the ranks of his most fervent devotees thought
seriously of Hitler as Germany’s coming ‘great leader’. But his rise
to star status on Munich’s political scene — alongside the
Hofbrauhaus, the city’s only notable curiosity, as one newspaper put
it -— meant that individuals from quite outside his normal social
circles began to take a keen interest in him.

Two were converts to the party who were able to open up useful
new contacts for Hitler. Kurt Liidecke, a well-connected former
gambler, playboy, and commercial adventurer, a widely-travelled
‘man of the world’, was ‘looking for a leader and a cause’ when he
first heard Hitler speak at the rally of the ‘Patriotic Associations’ in
Munich in August 1922. Ludecke was enthralled. ‘My critical faculty
was swept away,’ he later wrote. ‘He was holding the masses, and
me with them, under a hypnotic spell by the sheer force of his
conviction ... His appeal to German manhood was like a call to
arms, the gospel he preached a sacred truth. He seemed another
Luther ... I experienced an exaltation that could be likened only to
religious conversion ... I had found myself, my leader, and my
cause.’ According to his own account, Litidecke used his connections
to promote Hitler’s standing with General Ludendorff, a war hero
since repulsing the Russian advance into East Prussia in 1914, in
effect Germany’s dictator during the last two war years, and now
the outstanding figure on the radical Right, whose name alone was
sufficient to open further doors to Hitler. He also sang Hitler’s
praises to the former Munich chief of police, already an important
Nazi sympathizer and protector, Ernst Pohner. Abroad Ludecke was
able to establish contacts just before the ‘March on Rome’ with
Mussolini (who at that time had never heard of Hitler), and in 1923
with Gombos and other leading figures in Hungary. His foreign
bank accounts, and sizeable donations he was able to acquire
abroad, proved valuable to the party during the hyperinflation of
1923. He also fitted out and accommodated at his own cost an
entire stormtrooper company. Even so, many of Ltidecke’s well-
placed contacts were impatient at his constant proselytizing for the

NSDAP, and quietly dropped him. And within the party, he was
unable to overcome dislike and distrust. He was even denounced to
the police by Max Amann as a French spy and jailed under false
pretences for two months. By the end of 1923, Ltidecke had used up
almost his entire income on behalf of the party.

An even more useful convert was Ernst ‘Putzi’ Hanfstaengl, a six-
foot-four-inch-tall, cultured part-American — his mother, a Sedgwick-
Heine, was a descendant of a colonel who had fought in the Civil
War — from an upper middle-class art-dealer family, Harvard
graduate, partner in an art-print publishing firm, and extremely
well-connected in Munich salon society. Like Liidecke, his first
experience of Hitler was hearing him speak. Hanfstaengl was
greatly impressed by Hitler’s power to sway the masses. ‘Far
beyond his electrifying rhetoric,’ he later wrote, ‘this man seemed
to possess the uncanny gift of coupling the gnostic yearning of the
era for a strong leader-figure with his own missionary claim and to
suggest in this merging that every conceivable hope and expectation
was capable of fulfilment — an astonishing spectacle of suggestive
influence of the mass psyche.’ Hanfstaengl was plainly fascinated by
the subaltern, petty-bourgeois Hitler in his shabby blue suit, looking
part-way between an NCO and a clerk, with awkward mannerisms,
but possessing such power as a speaker when addressing a mass
audience. Hanfstaengl remained in part contemptuous of Hitler —
not least of his half-baked, cliché-ridden judgements on art and
culture (where Hanfstaengl was truly at home and Hitler merely an
opinionated know-all). On Hitler’s first visit to the Hanfstaengl
home, ‘his awkward use of knife and fork betrayed his background’,
wrote (somewhat snobbishly) his host. At the same time, Putzi was
plainly captivated by this ‘virtuoso on the keyboard of the mass
pysche’. He was appalled at catching Hitler sugaring a vintage wine
he had offered him. But, added Hanfstaengl, ‘he could have
peppered it, for each naive act increased my belief in his homespun
sincerity’.

Soon, Hitler was a regular guest at Hanfstaengl’s home, where he
gorged himself on cream-cakes, paying court to Hanfstaengl’s

attractive wife, Helene, in his quaint, Viennese style. She took
Hitler’s attentions in her stride. ‘Believe me, he’s an absolute neuter,
not a man,’ she told her husband. Putzi himself believed, for what it
was worth, that Hitler was sexually impotent, gaining substitute
gratification from his intercourse with the ‘feminine’ masses. Hitler
was taken by Putzi’s skills as a pianist, especially his ability to play
Wagner. He would accompany Putzi by whistling the tune,
marching up and down swinging his arms like the conductor of an
orchestra, relaxing visibly in the process. He plainly liked
Hanfstaengl — his wife even more so. But the criterion, as always,
was usefulness. And above all Hanfstaengl was useful. He became a
type of ‘social secretary’, providing openings to circles far different
from the petty-bourgeois roughnecks in Hitler’s entourage who
gathered each Monday in the Café Neumaier.

Hanfstaengl introduced Hitler to Frau Elsa Bruckmann, the wife
of the publisher Hugo Bruckmann, a Pan-German sympathizer and
antisemite who had published the works of Houston Stewart
Chamberlain. Hitler’s ingratiating manners and social naivety
brought out the mother instinct in her. Whether it was the wish to
afford him some protection against his enemies that persuaded her
to make him a present of one of the dog-whips he invariably carried
around is not clear. (Oddly, his other dog-whip — the first he
possessed — had been given to him by a rival patroness, Frau Helene
Bechstein, while a third heavy whip, made from hippopotamus hide,
which he later carried, was given to him by Frau Btichner, the
landlady of the Platterhof, the hotel where he stayed on the
Obersalzberg.) Everyone who was someone in Munich would be
invited at some stage to the soirées of Frau Bruckmann, by birth a
Romanian princess, so that Hitler was brought into contact here
with industrialists, members of the army and aristocracy, and
academics. In his gangster hat and trenchcoat over his dinner jacket,
touting a pistol and carrying as usual his dog-whip, he cut a bizarre
figure in the salons of Munich’s upper-crust. But his very eccentricity
of dress and exaggerated mannerisms — the affected excessive
politeness of one aware of his social inferiority — saw him lionized

by condescending hosts and fellow-guests. His social awkwardness
and uncertainty, often covered by either silence or tendency to
monologues, but at the same time the consciousness of his public
success that one could read in his face, made him an oddity,
affording him curiosity value among the patronizing cultured and
well-to-do pillars of the establishment.

Hitler was also a guest from time to time of the publisher
Lehmann, for long a party sympathizer. And the wife of piano
manufacturer Bechstein — to whom he had been introduced by
Eckart — was another to ‘mother’ Hitler, as well as lending the party
her jewellery as surety against 60,000 Swiss Francs which Hitler
was able to borrow from a Berlin coffee merchant in September
1923. The Bechsteins, who usually wintered in Bavaria, used to
invite Hitler to their suite in the ‘Bayerischer Hof’, or to their
country residence near Berchtesgaden. Through the Bechsteins,
Hitler was introduced to the Wagner circle at Bayreuth. He was
transfixed at the first visit, in October 1923, to the shrine of his
ultimate hero at Haus Wahnfried, where he tiptoed around the
former possessions of Richard Wagner in the music-room and
library ‘as though he were viewing relics in a cathedral’. The
Wagners had mixed views of their unusual guest, who had turned
up looking ‘rather common’ in his traditional Bavarian outfit of
lederhosen, thick woollen socks, red and blue checked shirt, and ill-
fitting short blue jacket. Winifred, the English-born wife of
Wagner’s son Siegfried, thought he was ‘destined to be the saviour
of Germany’. Siegfried himself saw Hitler as ‘a fraud and an
upstart’.

The rapid growth in the party during the latter part of 1922 and
especially in 1923 that had made it a political force in Munich, its
closer connections with the ‘patriotic associations’, and the wider
social contacts which now arose meant that funding flowed more
readily to the NSDAP than had been the case in its first years. Now,
as later, the party’s finances relied heavily upon members’
subscriptions together with entrance-fees and collections at
meetings. The more came to meetings, the more were recruited as

members, the more income came to the party, to permit yet more
meetings to be held. Propaganda financed propaganda.

But even now, the party’s heavy outgoings were difficult to meet,
and funding was not easy to drum up in conditions of rip-roaring
inflation. There was a premium on donations made in hard foreign
currency. Liidecke and Hanfstaengl, as already noted, were useful in
this regard. Hanfstaengl also financed with an interest-free loan of
1,000 dollars — a fortune in inflation-ridden Germany — the purchase
of two rotary presses that enabled the Volkischer Beobachter to
appear in larger, American-style format. Rumours, some far wide of
the mark, about the party’s finances were repeatedly aired by
opponents in the press. Even so, official inquiries in 1923 revealed
considerable sums raised from an increasing array of benefactors.

One important go-between was Max Erwin von Scheubner-
Richter, born in Riga, linguistically able, with diplomatic service in
Turkey during the war, and later imprisoned for a time by
Communists on his return to the Baltic. After the war he had
participated in the Kapp Putsch, then, like so many counter-
revolutionaries, made his way to Munich, where he joined the
NSDAP in autumn 1920. A significant, if shadowy, figure in the
early Nazi Party, he used his excellent connections with Russian
émigrés, such as Princess Alexandra, wife of the Russian heir to the
throne Prince Kyrill, to acquire funds directed at Ludendorff and,
through him, deflected in part to the NSDAP. Other members of the
aristocracy, including Frau Gertrud von Seidlitz, who used monies
from foreign stocks and shares, also contributed to Nazi funds.
Hitler was almost certainly a co-beneficiary (though probably in a
minor way) of the generous gift of 100,000 Gold Marks made by
Fritz Thyssen, heir to the family’s Ruhr steelworks, to Ludendorff,
but Germany’s leading industrialists, apart from Ernst von Borsig,
head of the Berlin locomotive and machine-building firm, showed
little direct interest in the Nazis at this time. Police inquiries which
remained inconclusive suggested that Borsig and car-manufacturers
Daimler were among other firms contributing to the party. Some

Bavarian industrialists and businessmen, too, were persuaded by
Hitler to make donations to the movement.

Valuable funds were also attained abroad. Anti-Marxism and the
hopes in a strong Germany as a bulwark against Bolshevism often
provided motive enough for such donations. The Volkischer
Beobachter’s new offices were financed with Czech Kronen. An
important link with Swiss funds was Dr Emil Gansser, a Berlin
chemist and long-standing Nazi supporter, who engineered a gift of
33,000 Swiss Francs from right-wing Swiss benefactors. Further
Swiss donations followed a visit from Hitler himself to Zurich in the
summer of 1923. And from right-wing circles in the arch-enemy
France, 90,000 Gold Marks were passed to Captain Karl Mayr,
Hitler’s first patron, and from him to the ‘patriotic associations’. It
can be presumed that the NSDAP was among the beneficiaries. In
addition to monetary donations, Rohm saw to it that the SA, along
with other paramilitary organizations, was well provided with
equipment and weapons from his secret arsenal. Whatever the
financial support, without Rohm’s supplies an armed putsch would
scarcely have been possible.

In November 1922, rumours were already circulating that Hitler
was planning a putsch. By January 1923, in the explosive climate
following the French march into the Ruhr, the rumours in Munich of
a Hitler putsch were even stronger. The crisis, without which Hitler
would have been nothing, was deepening by the day. In its wake,
the Nazi movement was expanding rapidly. Some 35,000 were to
join between February and November 1923, giving a strength of
around 55,000 on the eve of the putsch. Recruits came from all
sections of society. Around a third were workers, a tenth or more
came from the upper-middle and professional classes, but more than
a half belonged to the crafts, commercial, white-collar, and farming
lower-middle class. Most had joined the party out of protest, anger,
and bitterness as the economic and political crisis mounted. The
same was true of the thousands flocking into the SA. Hitler had won
their support by promising them action. The sacrifices of the war
would be avenged. The revolution would be overturned. He could

not hold them at fever-pitch indefinitely without unleashing such
action. The tendency to ‘go for broke’ was not simply a character-
trait of Hitler; it was built into the nature of his leadership, his
political aims, and the party he led. But Hitler was not in control of
events as they unfolded in 1923. Nor was he, before 8 November,
the leading player in the drama. Without the readiness of powerful
figures and organizations to contemplate a putsch against Berlin,
Hitler would have had no stage on which to act so disastrously. His
own role, his actions — and reactions — have to be seen in that light.

Ill

Hitler’s incessant barrage of anti-government propaganda was
nearly undermined by an event that invoked national unity in
January 1923: the French occupation of the Ruhr. On this occasion
at least, the Reich government seemed to be acting firmly — and
acting with mass popular support — through its campaign of ‘passive
resistance’ against the occupation. Attacks on the Berlin government
at this juncture seemed unpromising. Undeterred, Hitler saw
advantage to be gained from the French occupation. As usual, he
went on a propaganda offensive.

On the very day of the French march into the Ruhr he spoke in a
packed Circus Krone. ‘Down with the November Criminals’ was the
title of his speech. It was not the first time he had used the term
‘November Criminals’ to describe the Social Democrat
revolutionaries of 1918. But from now on, the slogan was seldom
far from his lips. It showed the line he would take towards the Ruhr
occupation. The real enemy was within. Marxism, democracy,
parliamentarism, internationalism, and, of course, behind it all the
power of the Jews, were held by Hitler to blame for the national
defencelessness that allowed the French to treat Germany like a
colony.

The propaganda offensive was stepped up with preparations for
the NSDAP’s first ‘Reich Party Rally’, scheduled to take place in
Munich on 27-29 January. It brought confrontation with the

Bavarian government, so frightened about rumours of a putsch that
on 26 January it declared a state of emergency in Munich, but so
weak that it lacked the power to carry through its intended ban on
the rally. At the meetings during the rally, Hitler could once more
appear self-confident, certain of success, to the masses of his
supporters. The whole rally had been devised in the form of a ritual
homage-paying to the ‘leader of the German freedom-movement’.
The leadership cult, consciously devised to sustain maximum
cohesion within the party, was taking off. According to a newspaper
report, Hitler was greeted ‘like a saviour’ when he entered the
Festsaal of the Hofbrauhaus during one of his twelve speeches on
the evening of 27 January. In the feverish atmosphere in the
Lowenbraukeller the same evening, he was given a similar hero’s
welcome as he entered the hall, deliberately late, shielded by his
bodyguard, arm outstretched in the salute — probably borrowed
from the Italian Fascists (and by them from Imperial Rome) — which
would become standard in the Movement by 1926.

Hitler’s near-exclusive concentration on propaganda was not
Rohm’s approach, while the latter’s emphasis on the paramilitary
posed a latent threat to Hitler’s authority. At the beginning of
February, Rohm founded a ‘Working Group of the Patriotic Fighting
Associations’ (Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Vaterlandischen
Kampfverbande) comprising, alongside the SA, the Bund Oberland,
Reichsflagge, Wikingbund, and Kampfverband Niederbayern. Direct
military control was in the hands of retired Oberstleutnant Hermann
Kriebel, previously a chief of staff in the Bavarian Einwohnerwehr.
The formations were trained by the Bavarian Reichswehr — not for
incorporation in any defence against further inroads by the French
and Belgians (the threat of which was by this time plainly
receding), but evidently for the eventuality of conflict with Berlin.
Once subsumed in this umbrella organization, the SA was far from
the biggest paramilitary grouping and there was little to distinguish
it from the other bodies. In a purely military organization, it had
only a subordinate role. The conversion of the SA to a paramilitary
organization now not directly or solely under his own control was

not to Hitler’s liking. But there was nothing he could do about it.
However, Hitler was pushed by Rohm into the foreground of the
political leadership of the ‘Working Community’. He it was who was
asked by Rohm to define the political aims of the ‘Working
Community’. He was now moving in high circles indeed. In early
1923 he was brought into contact by Rohm with no less than the
Chief of the Army Command of the Reichswehr, General Hans von
Seeckt (who remained, however, distinctly unimpressed by the
Munich demagogue, and unprepared to commit himself to the
demands for radical action in the Ruhr conflict for which Hitler was
pressing). Rohm also insisted to the new Bavarian Commander,
General Otto Hermann von Lossow, that Hitler’s movement, with its
aim of winning over the workers to the national cause, offered the
best potential for building a ‘patriotic fighting front’ to upturn the
November Revolution.

Connected with all the strands of nationalist paramilitary politics,
if openly directing none, was the figure of General Ludendorff,
regarded by most as the symbolic leader of the radical nationalist
Right. The former war-hero had returned to Germany from his
Swedish exile in February 1919, taking up residence in Munich. His
radical volkisch nationalism, detestation of the new Republic, and
prominent advocacy of the ‘stab-in-the-back’ legend, had already
taken him effortlessly into the slipstream of the Pan-Germans,
brought him fringe participation in the Kapp Putsch, and now led to
his close involvement with the counter-revolutionary extreme Right,
for whom his reputation and standing were a notable asset. The
hotbed of Munich’s volkisch and paramilitary politics provided the
setting within which, remarkably, the famous Quartermaster-
General, virtual dictator of Germany and chief driving-force of the
war effort between 1916 and 1918, could come into close contact
and direct collaboration with the former army corporal, Adolf
Hitler. Even more remarkable was the rapidity with which, in the
new world of rabble-rousing politics to which General Ludendorff
was ill-attuned, the ex-corporal would come to eclipse his one-time
military commander as the leading spokesman of the radical Right.

The paramilitary politics of spring 1923, in the wake of the
French occupation of the Ruhr, were confused and riddled with
conflict and intrigue. But, largely through Rohm’s manoeuvrings,
Hitler, the beerhall agitator, had been brought into the arena of top-
level discussions with the highest military as well as paramilitary
leadership, not just in Bavaria, but in the Reich. He was now a
player for big stakes. But he could not control the moves of other,
more powerful, players with their own agendas. His constant
agitation could mobilize support for a time. But this could not be
held at fever-pitch indefinitely. It demanded action. Hitler’s
impatience, his ‘all-or-nothing’ stance, was not simply a matter of
temperament.

Activists, as Hitler later acknowledged, could not be kept in a
state of tension indefinitely without some release. He proposed a
national demonstration on May Day, and an armed attack on the
‘Reds’. Increasingly alarmed by the prospect of serious disturbances,
the Munich police revoked its permission for the Left’s street-
parade, and allowed only a limited demonstration on the spacious
Theresienwiese near the city centre. Rumours of a putsch from the
Left, almost certainly set into circulation by the Right, served as a
pretext for a ‘defence’ by the paramilitary bodies. They demanded
‘their’ weapons back from safekeeping under the control of the
Reichswehr. But on the afternoon of 30 April, at a meeting with
paramilitary leaders, Lossow, concerned about the danger of a
putsch from the Right, refused to hand over the armaments. Hitler,
in a blind rage, accused Lossow of breach of trust. But there was
nothing to be done. Hitler had been overconfident. And this time,
for once, the state authorities had remained firm. All that could be
salvaged was a gathering the following morning of around 2,000
men from the paramilitary formations — about 1,300 from the
National Socialists —- on the Oberwiesenfeld in the barracks area
north of the city, well away from the May Day demonstration and
firmly ringed by a cordon of police. Tame exercises carried out with
arms distributed from Rohm’s arsenal were no substitute for the
planned assault on the Left. After standing around for much of the

time since dawn holding their rifles and facing the police, the men
handed back their arms around two o’clock and dispersed. Many
had left already. Most recognized the events of May Day to have
been a severe embarrassment for Hitler and his followers.

The May Day affair ought to have shown the government that
firm and resolute action could defeat Hitler. But by this time, the
Bavarian government had long since ruled out any potential for
working together with the democratic forces on the Left. It was
permanently at loggerheads with the Reich government. And it had
no effective control over its army leaders, who were playing their
own game. It was little wonder in this context that it was buffeted
in all directions. Incapable of tackling the problem of the radical
Right because both will and power were ultimately lacking to do so,
it allowed the Hitler Movement the space to recover from the
temporary setback of 1 May.

But above all, the lesson of 1 May was that Hitler was powerless
without the support of the Reichswehr. In January, when the Party
Rally had been initially banned, then allowed to go ahead, Lossow’s
permission had given Hitler the chance to escape the blow to his
prestige. Now, on 1 May, Lossow’s refusal had prevented Hitler’s
planned propaganda triumph. Deprived of his life-blood — regular
outlets for his propaganda — the main base of Hitler’s effectiveness
would have been undermined. But the Bavarian Reichswehr was to
remain largely an independent variable in the equation of Bavarian
politics in the latter part of 1923. And the part accommodating, part
vacillating attitude of the Bavarian authorities to the radical Right,
driven by fierce anti-socialism linked to its antagonism towards
Berlin, ensured that the momentum of Hitler’s movement was not
seriously checked by the May Day events. Hitler could, in fact, have
been taken out of circulation altogether for up to two years, had
charges of breach of the peace, arising from the May Day incidents,
been pressed. But the Bavarian Justice Minister Franz Gurtner saw
to it that the inquiries never came to formal charges — after Hitler
had threatened to reveal details of Reichswehr complicity in the

training and arming of the paramilitaries in preparation for a war
against France — and the matter was quietly dropped.

For his part, Hitler continued scarcely abated his relentless
agitation against the ‘November criminals’ during the summer of
1923. The fierce animosity towards Berlin, now as before providing
a bond between the otherwise competing sections of the Right,
ensured that his message of hatred and revenge towards internal as
well as external enemies would not be short of an audience. He
alone remained able to fill the cavernous Zircus Krone. Between
May and the beginning of August he addressed five overfilled
meetings there, and also spoke at another ten party meetings
elsewhere in Bavaria. But for deeds to follow words, Hitler had to
rely on others. He needed most of all the support of the Reichswehr.
But he also needed the cooperation of the other paramilitary
organizations. And in the realm of paramilitary politics, he was not
a free agent. Certainly, new members continued to pour into the SA
during the summer. But after the embarrassment of 1 May, Hitler
was for some time less prominent, even retreating at the end of
May for a while to stay with Dietrich Eckart in a small hotel at
Berchtesgaden. Among the members of the various branches of the
‘patriotic associations’, Ludendorff, not Hitler, was regarded as the
symbol of the ‘national struggle’. Hitler was in this forum only one
of a number of spokesmen. In the case of disagreement, he too had
to bow to Ludendorff’s superiority.

The former world-war hero took centre stage at the Deutscher Tag
(German Day) in Nuremberg on 1-2 September 1923, a massive
rally — the police reckoned 100,000 were present — of nationalist
paramilitary forces and veterans’ associations scheduled to coincide
with the anniversary of the German victory over France at the
battle of Sedan in 1870. Along with the Reichsflagge, the National
Socialists were particularly well represented. The enormous
propaganda spectacular enabled Hitler, the most effective of the
speakers, to repair the damage his reputation had suffered in May.
At the two-hour march-past of the formations, he stood together
with General Ludendorff, Prinz Ludwig Ferdinand of Bavaria, and

the military head of the ‘patriotic associations’, Oberstleutnant
Kriebel, on the podium.

What came out of the rally was the uniting of the NSDAP, the
Bund Oberland, and the Reichsflagge in the newly-formed Deutscher
Kampfbund (German Combat League). While Kriebel took over the
military leadership, Hitler’s man Scheubner-Richter was made
business-manager. Three weeks later, thanks to Rohm’s
machinations, Hitler was given, with the agreement of the heads of
the other paramilitary organizations, the ‘political leadership’ of the
Kampfbund.

What this meant in practice was not altogether clear. Hitler was
no dictator in the umbrella organization. And so far as there were
specific notions about a future dictator in the ‘coming Germany’,
that position was envisaged as Ludendorff ’s. For Hitler, ‘political
leadership’ seems to have indicated the subordination of
paramilitary politics to the building of a revolutionary mass
movement through nationalist propaganda and agitation. But for the
leaders of the formations, the ‘primacy of the soldier’ — the
professionals like Rohm and Kriebel — was what still counted. Hitler
was seen as a type of ‘political instructor’. He could whip up the
feelings of the masses like no one else. But beyond that he had no
clear idea of the mechanics of attaining power. Cooler heads were
needed for that. As an ‘Action Programme’ of the Kampfbund drawn
up by Scheubner-Richter on 24 September made plain, the ‘national
revolution’ in Bavaria had to follow, not precede, the winning over
of the army and police, the forces that sustained the power of the
state. Scheubner-Richter concluded that it was necessary to take
over the police in a formally legal fashion by placing Kampfbund
leaders in charge of the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior and the
Munich police. Hitler, like his partners in the Kampfbund, knew that
an attempt at a putsch in the teeth of opposition from the forces of
the military and police in Bavaria stood little chance of success. But
for the time being his approach, as ever, was to go on a frontal
propaganda offensive against the Bavarian government. His position
within the Kampfbund now ensured that the pressure to act — even

without a clear strategy for the practical steps needed to gain
control of the state — would not relent.

Crisis was Hitler’s oxygen. He needed it to survive. And the
deteriorating conditions in Germany (with their distinctive flavour
in Bavaria) as summer turned to autumn, and the currency collapsed
totally under the impact of the ‘passive resistance’ policy,
guaranteed an increasing appeal for Hitler’s brand of agitation. By
the time he took over the political leadership of the Kampfbund,
Germany’s searing crisis was heading for its denouement.

The country was bankrupt, its currency ruined. Inflation had gone
into a dizzy tail-spin. Speculators and profiteers thrived. But the
material consequences of the hyper-inflation for ordinary people
were devastating, the psychological effects incalculable. Savings of
a lifetime were wiped out within hours. Insurance policies were not
worth the paper they were written on. Those with pensions and
fixed incomes saw their only source of support dissolve into
worthlessness. Workers were less badly hit. Employers, eager to
prevent social unrest, agreed with trade unions to index wages to
living costs. Even so, it was little wonder that the massive
discontent brought sharp political radicalization on the Left as well
as on the Right.

Bavaria’s immediate response to the ending of passive resistance
on 26 September was to proclaim a state of emergency and make
Gustav Ritter von Kahr General State Commissar with near-
dictatorial powers. The Reich responded with the declaration of a
general state of emergency and the granting of emergency powers
to the Reichswehr. One of Kahr’s first acts was to ban — amid
renewed putsch rumours — the fourteen meetings which the NSDAP
had planned for the evening of 27 September. Hitler was in a frenzy
of rage. He felt bypassed by the manoeuvre to bring in Kahr, and
certain that the head of the Bavarian state was not the man to lead a
national revolution. Alongside attacks on the Reich government for

betraying the national resistance — a contrary, though more popular,
line to that he had taken earlier in the year towards the policy of
passive resistance — Hitler now turned his fire on Kahr.

The weeks following Kahr’s appointment were filled with plot,
intrigue, and tension which mounted to fever-pitch. The Munich
police registered a worsening mood by September, looking for an
outlet in some sort of action. Political meetings were, however, not
well attended because of the high entry charges and the price of
beer. Only the Nazis could continue to fill the beerhalls. As rumours
of a forthcoming putsch continued to circulate, there was a feeling
that something would have to happen soon.

Hitler was under pressure to act. The leader of the Munich SA
regiment, Wilhelm Brtickner, told him: ‘The day is coming when I
can no longer hold my people. If nothing happens now the men will
sneak away.’ Scheubner-Richter said much the same: ‘In order to
keep the men together, one must finally undertake something.
Otherwise the people will become Left radicals.’ Hitler himself used
almost the identical argument with head of the Landespolizei
Colonel Hans Ritter von Seifger at the beginning of November:
‘Economic pressures drive our people so that we must either act or
our followers will swing to the Communists.’ Hitler’s instincts were
in any case to force the issue as soon as possible. The favourable
circumstances of the comprehensive state crisis could not last
indefinitely. He was determined not to be outflanked by von Kahr.
And his own prestige would wane if nothing was attempted and
enthusiasm dissipated, or if the movement were faced down again
as it had been on 1 May.

However, the cards were not in his hands. Kahr and the two other
members of the triumvirate which was effectively ruling Bavaria
(State Police chief SeifSer and Reichswehr commander Lossow) had
their own agenda, which differed in significant detail from that of
the Kampfbund leadership. In extensive negotiations with north
German contacts throughout October, the triumvirate was looking
to install a nationalist dictatorship in Berlin based on a directorate,
with or without Kahr as a member but certainly without the

inclusion of Ludendorff or Hitler, and resting on the support of the
Reichswehr. The Kampfbund leadership, on the other hand, wanted
a directorate in Munich, centring on Ludendorff and Hitler, certainly
without von Kahr, which would take Berlin by force. And while
Lossow took it for granted that any move against the Berlin
government would be carried out by the military, the Kampfbund
presumed that it would be a paramilitary operation with
Reichswehr backing. If need be, declared the Kampfbund military
leader, Oberstleutnant Kriebel, the Kampfbund would even resist
any attempts by the Bavarian government to use armed force
against the ‘patriotic associations’. Hitler did his best to win over
Lossow and Seifger, subjecting the latter on 24 October to a four-
hour lecture on his aims. Neither was persuaded to throw in his lot
with the Kampfbund, though the position of Lossow — with chief
responsibility for order in Bavaria - was ambiguous and wavering.

At the beginning of November, SeifSer was sent to Berlin to
conduct negotiations on behalf of the triumvirate with a number of
important contacts, most vitally with Seeckt. The Reichswehr chief
made plain at the meeting on 3 November that he would not move
against the legal government in Berlin. With that, any plans of the
triumvirate were effectively scuppered. At a crucial meeting in
Munich three days later with the heads of the ‘patriotic
associations’, including Kriebel of the Kampfbund, Kahr warned the
‘patriotic associations’ — by which he meant the Kampfbund —
against independent action. Any attempt to impose a national
government in Berlin had to be unified and follow prepared plans.
Lossow stated he would go along with a rightist dictatorship if the
chances of success were 51 per cent, but would have no truck with
an ill-devised putsch. SeifSer also underlined his support for Kahr
and readiness to put down a putsch by force. It was plain that the
triumvirate was not prepared to act against Berlin.

Hitler was now faced with the thread slipping through his fingers.
He was not prepared to wait any longer and risk losing the
initiative. It was clear, now as before, that a putsch would only be

successful with the support of police and army. But he was
determined to delay no longer.

At a meeting on the evening of 6 November with Scheubner-
Richter, Theodor von der Pfordten (a member of the supreme court
in Bavaria and shadowy figure in pre-putsch Nazi circles), and
probably other advisers (though this is not certain), he decided to
act — in the hope more than the certainty of forcing the triumvirate
to support the coup. The decision to strike was confirmed the next
day, 7 November, at a meeting of Kampfbund leaders. After a good
deal of discussion, Hitler’s plan was adopted. It was decided that the
strike would be carried out on the following day, 8 November,
when all the prominent figures in Munich would be assembled in
the Burgerbraukeller, one of the city’s huge beerhalls, to hear an
address from Kahr on the fifth anniversary of the November
Revolution, fiercely denouncing Marxism. Hitler felt his hand forced
by Kahr’s meeting. If the Kampfbund were to lead the ‘national
revolution’, there was nothing for it but to act on its own initiative
immediately. Much later, Hitler stated: ‘Our opponents intended to
proclaim a Bavarian revolution around the 12th of November ... I
took the decision to strike four days earlier.’

Kahr had been reading out his prepared speech to the 3,000 or so
packed into the Biirgerbraukeller for about half an hour when,
around 8.30 p.m., there was a disturbance at the entrance. Kahr
broke off his speech. A body of men in steel helmets appeared.
Hitler’s stormtroopers had arrived. A heavy machine-gun was
pushed into the hall. People were standing on their seats trying to
see what was happening as Hitler advanced through the hall,
accompanied by two armed bodyguards, their pistols pointing at the
ceiling. Hitler stood on a chair but, unable to make himself heard in
the tumult, took out his Browning pistol and fired a shot through
the ceiling. He then announced that the national revolution had
broken out, and that the hall was surrounded by 600 armed men. If
there was trouble, he said, he would bring a machine-gun into the
gallery. The Bavarian government was deposed; a provisional Reich
government would be formed. It was by this time around 8.45 p.m.

Hitler requested — though it was really an order — Kahr, Lossow, and
SeifSer to accompany him into the adjoining room. He guaranteed
their safety. After some hesitation, they complied. There was
bedlam in the hall, but eventually Goring managed to make himself
heard. He said the action was directed neither at Kahr nor at the
army and police. People should stay calm and remain in their
places. ‘You’ve got your beer,’ he added. This quietened things
somewhat.

In the adjoining room, Hitler announced, waving his pistol about,
that no one would leave without his permission. He declared the
formation of a new Reich government, headed by himself.
Ludendorff was to be in charge of the national army, Lossow would
be Reichswehr Minister, SeifSer Police Minister, Kahr himself would
be head of state as regent (Landesverweser), and Pohner Minister
President with dictatorial powers in Bavaria. He apologized for
having to force the pace, but it had to be done: he had had to enable
the triumvirate to act. If things went wrong, he had four bullets in
his pistol — three for his collaborators, the last for himself.

Hitler returned to the hall after about ten minutes amid renewed
tumult. He repeated Goring’s assurances that the action was not
directed at the police and Reichswehr, but ‘solely at the Berlin Jew
government and the November criminals of 1918’. He put forward
his proposals for the new governments in Berlin and Munich, now
mentioning Ludendorff as ‘leader, and chief with dictatorial power,
of the German national army’. He told the crowded hall that matters
were taking longer than he had earlier predicted. ‘Outside are Kahr,
Lossow, and SeifSer,’ he declared. ‘They are struggling hard to reach
a decision. May I say to them that you will stand behind them?’ As
the crowd bellowed back its approval, Hitler, with his pronounced
sense of the theatrical, announced in emotional terms: ‘I can say this
to you: Either the German revolution begins tonight or we will all
be dead by dawn!’ By the time he had finished his short address the
mood in the hall had swung completely in his favour.

About an hour had passed since Hitler’s initial entry into the hall
before he and Ludendorff (who had meanwhile arrived, dressed in

full uniform of the Imperial Army), together with the Bavarian
ruling triumvirate, returned to the podium. Kahr, calm, face like a
mask, spoke first, announcing to tumultuous applause that he had
agreed to serve Bavaria as regent for the monarchy. Hitler, with a
euphoric expression resembling childlike delight, declared that he
would direct the policy of the new Reich government, and warmly
clasped Kahr’s hand. Ludendorff, deadly earnest, spoke next,
mentioning his surprise at the whole business. Lossow, wearing a
somewhat impenetrable expression, and SeifSer, the most agitated of
the group, were pressed by Hitler into speaking. Pohner finally
promised cooperation with Kahr. Hitler shook hands once more
with the whole ensemble. He was the undoubted star of the show. It
appeared to be his night.

From this point, however, things went badly wrong. The hurried
improvisation of the planning, the hectic rush to prepare at only a
day’s notice, that had followed Hitler’s impatient insistence that the
putsch should be advanced to the evening of the Burgerbraukeller
meeting, now took its toll, determining the shambolic course of the
night’s events. Rohm did manage to occupy the Reichswehr
headquarters, though amazingly failed to take over the telephone
switchboard, allowing Lossow to order the transport to Munich of
loyalist troops in nearby towns and cities. Frick and Pohner were
also initially successful in taking control at police headquarters.
Elsewhere, the situation was deteriorating rapidly. In a night of
chaos, the putschists failed dismally, largely owing to their own
disorganization, to take control of barracks and government
buildings. The early and partial successes were for the most part
rapidly overturned. Neither the army nor the state police joined
forces with the putschists.

Back at the Burgerbraukeller, Hitler, too, was making his first
mistake of the evening. Hearing reports of difficulties the putschists
were encountering at the Engineers’ Barracks, he decided to go
there himself in what proved a vain attempt to intervene.
Ludendorff was left in charge at the Burgerbraukeller and, believing
the word of officers and gentlemen, promptly let Kahr, Lossow, and

SeifSer depart. They were then free to renege on the promises
extracted from them under duress by Hitler.

By late evening, Kahr, Lossow, and Seifger were in positions to
assure the state authorities that they repudiated the putsch. All
German radio stations were informed of this by Lossow at 2.55 a.m.
By the early hours, it was becoming clear to the putschists
themselves that the triumvirate and — far more importantly — the
Reichswehr and state police opposed the coup. At 5 a.m. Hitler was
still giving assurances that he was determined to fight and die for
the cause — a sign that by this time at the latest he, too, had lost
confidence in the success of the putsch.

The putschist leaders were themselves by this time unclear what
to do next. They sat around arguing, while the government forces
regrouped. There was no fall-back position. Hitler was as clueless as
the others. He was far from in control of the situation. As the
bitterly cold morning dawned, depressed troops began to drift off
from the Burgerbraukeller. Around 8 a.m. Hitler sent some of his SA
men to seize bundles of 50-billion Mark notes direct from the
printing press to keep his troops paid. It was more or less the only
practical action taken as the putsch started rapidly to crumble.

Only during the course of the morning did Hitler and Ludendorff
come up with the idea of a demonstration march through the city.
Ludendorff apparently made the initial suggestion. The aim was
predictably confused and unclear. ‘In Munich, Nuremberg, Bayreuth,
an immeasurable jubilation, an enormous enthusiasm would have
broken out in the German Reich,’ Hitler later remarked. ‘And when
the first division of the German national army had left the last
square metre of Bavarian soil and stepped for the first time on to
Thuringian land, we would have experienced the jubilation of the
people there. People would have had to recognize that the German
misery has an end, that redemption could only come about through
a rising.’ It amounted to a vague hope that the march would stir
popular enthusiasm for the putsch, and that the army, faced with
the fervour of the mobilized masses and the prospect of firing on
the war-hero Ludendorff, would change its mind. The gathering

acclaim of the masses and the support of the army would then pave
the way for a triumphant march on Berlin. Such was the wild
illusion — gesture politics born out of pessimism, depression, and
despair. Reality did not take long to assert itself.

Around noon, the column of about 2,000 men — many of them,
including Hitler, armed — set out from the Burgerbraukeller. Pistols
at the ready, they confronted a small police cordon on the
Ludwigsbricke and under threat swept it aside, headed to
Marienplatz, in the centre of the city, and decided then to march to
the War Ministry. They gained encouragement from throngs of
shouting and waving supporters on the pavements. Some thought
they were witnessing the arrival of the new government. The
putschists could not help but note, however, that many of the
posters proclaiming the national revolution had already been ripped
down or papered over with new directions from the ruling
triumvirate. The participants on the march knew the cause was lost.
One of them remarked that it was like a funeral procession.

At the top of the Residenzstrafse, as it approaches Odeonsplatz,
the marchers encountered the second, and larger, police cordon.
‘Here they come. Heil Hitler!’ a bystander cried out. Then shots
rang out. When the firing ceased, fourteen putschists and four
policemen lay dead.

The dead included one of the putsch architects, Erwin von
Scheubner-Richter, who had been in the front line of the putsch
leaders, linking arms with Hitler, just behind the standard-bearers.
Had the bullet which killed Scheubner-Richter been a foot to the
right, history would have taken a different course. As it was, Hitler
either took instant evasive action, or was wrenched to the ground
by Scheubner-Richter. In any event, he dislocated his left shoulder.
Goring was among those injured, shot in the leg. He and a number
of other leading putschists were able to escape over the Austrian
border. Some, including Streicher, Frick, Pohner, Amann, and
Rohm, were immediately arrested. Ludendorff, who had emerged
from the shoot-out totally unscathed, gave himself up and was
released on his officer’s word.

Hitler himself was attended to by Dr Walter Schultze, chief of the
Munich SA medical corps, pushed into his car, stationed nearby, and
driven at speed from the scene of the action. He ended up at
Hanfstaengl’s home in Uffing, near the Staffelsee, south of Munich,
where the police, on the evening of 11 November, found and
arrested him. While at Hanfstaengl’s — Putzi himself had taken flight
to Austria — he composed the first of his ‘political testaments’,
placing the party chairmanship in Rosenberg’s hands, with Amann
as his deputy. Hitler, according to Hanfstaengl’s later account, based
on his wife’s testimony, was desolate on arrival in Uffing. But later
stories that he had to be restrained from suicide have no firm
backing. He was depressed but calm, dressed in a white nightgown,
his injured left arm in a sling, when the police arrived to escort him
to prison in the old fortress at Landsberg am Lech, a picturesque
little town some forty miles west of Munich. Thirty-nine guards
were on hand to greet him in his new place of residence. Graf Arco,
the killer of Kurt Eisner, the Bavarian premier murdered in
February 1919, was evicted from his spacious Cell no. 7 to make
room for the new, high-ranking prisoner.

In Munich and other parts of Bavaria, the putsch fizzled out as
rapidly as it had started. Hitler was finished. At least, he should
have been.

Like the high-point of a dangerous fever, the crisis had passed, then
rapidly subsided. The following months brought currency
stabilization with the introduction of the Rentenmark, regulation of
the reparations issue through the Dawes Plan (named after the
American banker Charles G. Dawes, head of the committee which
established in 1924 a provisional framework for the phased
payment of reparations, commencing at a low level and linked to
foreign loans for Germany), and the beginning of the political
stabilization that marked the end of the post-war turbulence and
was to last until the new economic shock-waves of the late 1920s.

With Hitler in jail, the NSDAP banned, and the volkisch movement
split into its component factions, the threat from the extreme Right
lost its immediate potency.

Sympathies with the radical Right by no means disappeared. With
33 per cent of the votes in Munich, the Volkischer Block (the largest
grouping in the now fractured volkisch movement) was the strongest
party in the city at the Landtag elections on 6 April 1924, gaining
more votes than both the Socialists and Communists put together.
At the Reichstag election on 4 May, the result was little different.
The Volkischer Block won 28.5 per cent of the vote in Munich, 17
per cent overall in the electoral region of Upper Bavaria and
Swabia, and 20.8 per cent in Franconia. But the bubble had burst. As
Germany recovered and the Right remained in disarray, voters
deserted the volkisch movement. By the second Reichstag elections
of 1924, a fortnight before Hitler’s release from Landsberg, the vote
for the Volkischer Block had dwindled to residual limits of 7.5 per
cent in Franconia, 4.8 per cent in Upper Bavaria/Swabia, and 3.0
per cent in Lower Bavaria (compared with 10.2 per cent there eight
months earlier).

Bavaria, for all its continuing ingrained oddities, was no longer
the boiling cauldron of radical Right insurgency it had been
between 1920 and 1923. The paramilitary organizations had had
their teeth drawn in the confrontation with the legal forces of the
state. Without the support of the army, they were shown to be little
more than a paper tiger. In the aftermath of the putsch, the
Kampfbund organizations were dissolved, and the ‘patriotic
associations’ in general had their weaponry confiscated, a ban
imposed on their military exercises, and their activities greatly
curtailed. The triumvirate installed by the Bavarian government as a
force on the Right to contain the wilder and even more extreme
nationalist paramilitaries lost power and credibility through the
putsch. Kahr, Lossow, and SeifSer were all ousted by early 1924.
With the General Commissariat terminated, conventional cabinet
government under a new Minister President, Dr Heinrich Held — the

leading figure in the Catholic establishment party in Bavaria, the
BVP — and with it a degree of calm, returned to Bavarian politics.

Even now, however, the forces which had given Hitler his entrée
into politics and enabled him to develop into a key factor on the
Bavarian Right contrived to save him when his ‘career’ ought to
have been over. The ‘Hitler-Putsch’ was, as we have seen, by no
means merely Hitler’s putsch. The Bavarian Reichswehr had
colluded massively in the training and preparation of the forces
which had tried to take over the state. And important personages
had been implicated in the putsch attempt. Whatever their
subsequent defence of their actions, the hands of Kahr, Lossow, and
SeifSer were dirty, while the war hero General Ludendorff had been
the spiritual figurehead of the entire enterprise. There was every
reason, therefore, in the trial of the putsch leaders held in Munich
between 26 February and 27 March 1924 to let the spotlight fall
completely on Hitler. He was only too glad to play the role assigned
to him.

Hitler’s first reaction to his indictment had been very different
from his later triumphalist performance in the Munich court. He had
initially refused to say anything, and announced that he was going
on hunger-strike. At this time, he plainly saw everything as lost.
According to the prison psychologist — though speaking many years
after the event — Hitler stated: ‘I’ve had enough. I’m finished. If I
had a revolver, I would take it.’ Drexler later claimed that he
himself had dissuaded Hitler from his intention to commit suicide.

By the time the trial opened, Hitler’s stance had changed
diametrically. He was allowed to turn the courtroom into a stage
for his own propaganda, accepting full responsibility for what had
happened, not merely justifying but glorifying his role in
attempting to overthrow the Weimar state. This was in no small
measure owing to his threats to expose the complicity in
treasonable activity of Kahr, Lossow, and SeifSer — and in particular
the role of the Bavarian Reichswehr.

The ruling forces in Bavaria did what they could to limit potential
damage. The first priority was to make sure that the trial was held

under Bavarian jurisdiction. In strict legality, the trial ought not to
have taken place in Munich at all, but at the Reich Court in Leipzig.
However, the Reich government gave way to pressure from the
Bavarian government. The trial was set for the People’s Court in
Munich.

Kahr had hoped to avoid any trial, or at least have no more than
a perfunctory one where the indicted would plead guilty but claim
mitigating grounds of patriotism. Since some at least of the
putschists would not agree, this course of action had to be dropped.
But it seems highly probable that the accused were offered leniency
for such a proposal even to have been considered. Hitler had, at any
rate, become confident about the outcome. He still held a trump
card in his hand. When Hanfstaeng]l visited him in his cell in the
courthouse, during the trial, he showed no fear of the verdict. ‘What
can they do to me?’ he asked. ‘I only need to come out with a bit
more, especially about Lossow, and there’s the big scandal. Those in
the know are well aware of that.’ This, and the attitude of the
presiding judge and his fellow judges, explains Hitler’s self-
confident appearance at the trial.

Among those indicted alongside Hitler were Ludendorff, Pohner,
Frick, Weber (of Bund Oberland), Rohm, and Kriebel. But the
indictment itself was emphatic that ‘Hitler was the soul of the entire
enterprise’. Judge Neithardt, the president of the court, had
reputedly stated before the trial that Ludendorff would be acquitted.
The judge replaced a damaging record of Ludendorff ’s first
interrogation by one which indicated his ignorance about the putsch
preparations. Hitler, meanwhile, was given the freedom of the
courtroom. One journalist attending the trial described it as a
‘political carnival’. He compared the deference shown to the
defendants with the brusque way those arraigned for their actions in
the Raterepublik had been handled. He heard one of the judges,
after Hitler’s first speech, remark: ‘What a tremendous chap, this
Hitler!’ Hitler was allowed to appear in his suit, not prison garb,
sporting his Iron Cross, First Class. Ludendorff, not held in prison,
arrived in a luxury limousine. Dr Weber, though under arrest, was

allowed to take a Sunday afternoon walk round Munich. The
extraordinary bias of the presiding judge was later most severely
criticized both in Berlin and by the Bavarian government, irritated
at the way attacks on the Reichswehr and state police had been
allowed without contradiction. Judge Neithardt was informed in no
uncertain terms during the trial of the ‘embarrassing impression’ left
by allowing Hitler to speak for four hours. His only response was
that it was impossible to interrupt the torrent of words. Hitler was
also allowed the freedom to interrogate witnesses — above all Kahr,
Lossow, and Seifser — at length, frequently deviating into politically
loaded statements.

When the verdicts were read out four days after the trial ended,
on 1 April 1924, Ludendorff was duly acquitted — which he took as
an insult. Hitler, along with Weber, Kriebel, and Pohner, was
sentenced to a mere five years’ imprisonment for high treason (less
the four months and two weeks he had already been in custody),
and a fine of 200 Gold Marks (or a further twenty days’
imprisonment). The others indicted received even milder sentences.
The lay judges, as Hitler later acknowledged, had only been
prepared to accept a verdict of ‘guilty’ on condition that he received
the mildest sentence, with the prospect of early release. The court
explained why it rejected the deportation of Hitler under the terms
of the ‘Protection of the Republic Act’: ‘Hitler is a German-Austrian.
He considers himself to be a German. In the opinion of the court,
the meaning and intention of the terms of section 9, para II of the
Law for the Protection of the Republic cannot apply to a man who
thinks and feels as German as Hitler, who voluntarily served for
four and a half years in the German army at war, who attained high
military honours through outstanding bravery in the face of the
enemy, was wounded, suffered other damage to his health, and was
released from the military into the control of the District Command
Munich I.’

Even on the conservative Right in Bavaria, the conduct of the
trial and sentences prompted amazement and disgust. In legal
terms, the sentence was nothing short of scandalous. No mention

was made in the verdict of the four policemen shot by the
putschists; the robbery of 14,605 billion paper Marks (the
equivalent of around 28,000 Gold Marks) was entirely played down;
the destruction of the offices of the SPD newspaper Miinchener Post
and the taking of a number of Social Democratic city councillors as
hostages were not blamed on Hitler; and no word was made of the
text of a new constitution, found in the pocket of the dead putschist
von der Pfordten. Nor did the judge’s reasons for the sentence make
any reference to the fact that Hitler was still technically within the
probationary period for good behaviour imposed on him in the
sentence for breach of the peace in January 1922. Legally, he was
not eligible for any further probation.

The judge in that first Hitler trial was the same person as the
judge presiding over his trial for high treason in 1924: the
nationalist sympathizer Georg Neithardt.

Hitler returned to Landsberg to begin his light sentence in
conditions more akin to those of a hotel than a penitentiary. The
windows of his large, comfortably furnished room on the first floor
afforded an expansive view over the attractive countryside. Dressed
in lederhosen, he could relax with a newspaper in an easy wicker
chair, his back to a laurel wreath provided by admirers, or sit at a
large desk sifting through the mounds of correspondence he
received. He was treated with great respect by his jailers, some of
whom secretly greeted him with ‘Heil Hitler’, and accorded every
possible privilege. Gifts, flowers, letters of support, encomiums of
praise, all poured in. He received more visitors than he could cope
with — over 500 of them before he eventually felt compelled to
restrict access. Around forty fellow-prisoners, some of them
volunteer internees, able to enjoy almost all the comforts of normal
daily life, fawned on him. He read of the demonstration on 23 April,
to celebrate his thirty-fifth birthday three days earlier, of 3,000
National Socialists, former front soldiers, and supporters of the
volkisch movement in the Burgerbraukeller ‘in honour of the man
who had lit the present flame of liberation and volkisch
consciousness in the German people’. Under the impact of the star-

status that the trial had brought him, and the Fuhrer cult that his
supporters had begun to form around him, he began to reflect on his
political ideas, his ‘mission’, his ‘restart’ in politics once his short
sentence was over, and pondered the lessons to be learnt from the
putsch.

The debacle at the Burgerbraukeller and its denouement next day
at the Feldherrnhalle taught Hitler once and for all that an attempt
to seize power in the face of opposition from the armed forces was
doomed. He felt justified in his belief that propaganda and mass
mobilization, not paramilitary putschism, would open the path to
the ‘national revolution’. Consequently, he distanced himself from
Rohm’s attempts to revitalize in new guise the Kampfbund and to
build a type of people’s militia. Ultimately, the different
approaches, as well as power-ambitions, of Hitler and Rohm, would
lead to the murderous split in 1934. It would be going too far,
however, to presume that Hitler had renounced the idea of a
takeover of the state by force in favour of the ‘legal path’.
Certainly, he subsequently had to profess a commitment to legality
in order to involve himself in politics again. And later, electoral
success appeared in any case the best strategy to win power. But the
putschist approach was never given up. It continued, as the
lingering problems with the SA would indicate, to coexist alongside
the proclaimed ‘legal’ way. Hitler was adamant, however, that on
any future occasion it could only be with, not against, the
Reichswehr.

Hitler’s experience was to lead to the last, and not least, of the
lessons he would draw from his ‘apprenticeship years’: that to be
the ‘drummer’ was not enough; and that to be more than that meant
he needed not only complete mastery in his own movement but,
above all, greater freedom from external dependencies, from
competing groupings on the Right, from paramilitary organizations
he could not fully control, from the bourgeois politicians and army
figures who had smoothed his political rise, used him, then dropped
him when it suited them.

The ambivalence about his intended role after the ‘national
revolution’ was still present in his comments during his trial. He
insisted that he saw Ludendorff as the ‘military leader of the coming
Germany’ and ‘leader of the coming great showdown’. But he
claimed that he himself was ‘the political leader of this young
Germany’. The precise division of labour had, he said, not been
determined. In his closing address to the court, Hitler returned to
the leadership question — though still in somewhat vague and
indeterminate fashion. He referred to Lossow’s remarks to the court
that during discussions in spring 1923 he had thought Hitler had
merely wanted ‘as propagandist and awakener to arouse the
people’. ‘How petty do small men think,’ went on Hitler. He did not
see the attainment of a ministerial post as worthy of a great man.
What he wanted, he said, was to be the destroyer of Marxism. That
was his task. ‘Not from modesty did I want at that time to be the
drummer. That is the highest there is. The rest is unimportant.’
When it came to it, he had demanded two things: that he should be
given the leadership of the political struggle; and that the
organizational leadership should go to ‘the hero ... who in the eyes
of the entire young Germany is called to it’. Hitler hinted — though
did not state explicitly — that this was to have been Ludendorff. On
the other hand, in his address to Kampfbund leaders a fortnight
before the putsch, he had seemed to envisage Ludendorff as no
more than the reorganizer of the future national army. Then again,
the proclamation put up during the putsch itself over Hitler’s name
as Reich Chancellor appeared to indicate that the headship of
government was the position he foresaw for himself, sharing
dictatorial power with Ludendorff as head of state (Reichsverweser,
or regent).

Whatever the ambivalence, real or simply tactical, still present in
Hitler’s remarks at the trial, it soon gave way to clarity about his
self-image. For in Landsberg the realization dawned on Hitler: he
was not the ‘drummer’ after all; he was the predestined Leader
himself.

6
Emergence of the Leader

The year that ought to have seen the spectre of Hitler banished for
good brought instead — though this could scarcely be clearly seen at
the time — the genesis of his later absolute pre-eminence in the
volkisch movement and his ascendancy to supreme leadership. In
retrospect, the year 1924 can be seen as the time when, like a
phoenix arising from the ashes, Hitler could begin his emergence
from the ruins of the broken and fragmented volkisch movement to
become eventually the absolute leader with total mastery over a
reformed, organizationally far stronger, and internally more
cohesive Nazi Party.

Nothing could have demonstrated more plainly how indispensable
Hitler was to the volkisch Right than the thirteen months of his
imprisonment, the ‘leaderless time’ of the movement. With Hitler
removed from the scene and, from June 1924, withdrawing from all
involvement in politics to concentrate on the writing of Mein Kampf,
the volkisch movement descended into squabbling factionalism and
internecine strife. By courtesy of Bavarian justice, Hitler had been
allowed to use the courtroom to portray himself as the hero of the
Right for his role in the putsch. Competing individuals and groups
felt compelled to assert Hitler’s authority and backing for their
actions. But in his absence, this was insufficient in itself to ensure
success. Moreover, Hitler was often inconsistent, contradictory, or
unclear in his views on developments. His claim to a leadership
position could not be ignored, and was not disputed. Any claim to
exclusive leadership was, however, upheld only by a minority in the
volkisch movement. And as long as Hitler was unable directly to

influence developments, the narrow core of his fervent devotees
was largely marginalized even within the broad volkisch Right, often
at war with each other, and split on tactics, strategy, and ideology.
By the time of his release in December 1924, the Reichstag elections
of that month had reflected the catastrophic decline of support for
the volkisch movement, which had come to form little more than a
group of disunited nationalist and racist sects on the extreme fringe
of the political spectrum.

Just before his arrest on 11 November 1923, Hitler had placed
Alfred Rosenberg, editor of the Volkischer Beobachter, in charge of
the banned party during his absence, to be supported by Esser,
Streicher, and Amann. Like a number of leading Nazis (including
Hef, Scheubner-Richter, and Hitler himself ), Rosenberg’s origins
did not lie within the boundaries of the German Reich. Born into a
well-off bourgeois family in Reval (now Tallinn), Estonia, the
introverted self-styled party ‘philosopher’, dogmatic but dull,
arrogant and cold, one of the least charismatic and least popular of
Nazi leaders, united other party bigwigs only in their intense dislike
of him. Distinctly lacking in leadership qualities, he was scarcely an
obvious choice, and was as surprised as others were by Hitler’s
nomination. Possibly, as is usually surmised, it was precisely
Rosenberg’s lack of leadership ability that commended itself to
Hitler. Certainly, a less likely rival to Hitler could scarcely be
imagined. But this would presume that Hitler, in the traumatic
aftermath of the failed putsch, was capable of lucid, machiavellian
planning, that he anticipated what would happen and actually
wanted and expected his movement to fall apart in his absence. A
more likely explanation is that he made a hasty and ill-conceived
decision, under pressure and in a depressed frame of mind, to
entrust the party’s affairs to a member of his Munich coterie whose
loyalty was beyond question. Rosenberg was, in fact, one of the few
leading figures in the movement still available. Scheubner-Richter
was dead. Others had scattered in the post-putsch turmoil, or had
been arrested. Even — though Hitler could scarcely have known this
— the three trusted lieutenants he had designated to support

Rosenberg were temporarily out of action. Esser had fled to Austria,
Amann was in jail, and Streicher was preoccupied with matters in
Nuremberg. Rosenberg was probably no more than a hastily chosen
least bad option.

On 1 January 1924, Rosenberg founded the Grofgdeutsche
Volksgemeinschaft (GVG, ‘Greater German National Community’),
intended to serve, during the NSDAP’s ban, as its successor
organization. By the summer, Rosenberg had been ousted, and the
GVG had fallen under the control of Hermann Esser (returned in
May from his exile in Austria) and Julius Streicher. But the coarse
personalities, insulting behaviour, and clumsy methods of Esser and
Streicher merely succeeded in alienating many Hitler followers. Far
from all Hitler loyalists, in any case, had joined the GVG. Gregor
Strasser, for example, a Landshut apothecary who was to emerge in
the post-putsch era as the leading figure in the party after Hitler,
joined the Deutschvolkische Freiheitspartei (DVFP), a rival volkisch
organization headed by Albrecht Graefe, formerly a member of the
conservative DNVP, with its stronghold in Mecklenburg and its
headquarters in Berlin.

Conflict was not long deferred once Hitler was in prison. The
DVFP had been less affected by proscription than had the NSDAP. In
contrast to the disarray within the Hitler Movement, Graefe and
other DVFP leaders were still at liberty to control a party
organization left largely in place. And though the DVFP leaders
lauded Hitler’s actions in the putsch in an attempt to win over his
supporters, they were actually keen to take advantage of the
situation and to establish their own supremacy. That the DVFP
leaders advocated electoral participation by the volkisch movement
added to the growing conflict. A move towards a parliamentary
strategy alienated many Nazis, and was vehemently opposed by
NSDAP diehards in northern Germany. Their spokesman, Ludolf
Haase, the leader of the Gottingen branch, was increasingly critical
of Rosenberg’s authority, and above all keen to keep the north
German NSDAP from the clutches of Graefe.

Those volkisch groups that were prepared, however reluctantly, to
enter parliament in order to be in a position one day to destroy it,
decided to enter into electoral alliances to allow them to contest the
series of regional (Landtag) elections that began in February, and
the Reichstag election — the first of two that year —- on 4 May 1924.
Hitler was opposed to this strategy, but his opposition made no
difference. The decision to participate went ahead. It seemed to be
borne out by the results. In the February Landtag elections in
Mecklenburg-Schwerin, Graefe’s stronghold, the DVFP won thirteen
out of sixty-four seats. And on 6 April in the Bavarian Landtag
elections, the Volkischer Block, as the electoral alliance called itself
there, won 17 per cent of the vote.

The Reichstag election results, it seems, helped persuade Hitler
that the parliamentary tactic, pragmatically and purposefully
deployed, promised to pay dividends. The volkisch vote, bolstered
by the publicity and outcome of the Hitler trial, had stood up well,
with a result of 6.5 per cent and thirty-two seats in the Reichstag.
The results in Graefe’s territory of Mecklenburg (20.8 per cent) and
Bavaria (16 per cent) were particularly good. That only ten of the
volkisch Reichstag members were from the NSDAP and twenty-two
from the DVFP gave some indication, however, of the relative
weakness of the remnants of the Hitler Movement at the time.

In the first of two visits he paid to Landsberg in May, Ludendorff,
whose contacts in north Germany were extensive despite his
continued residence near Munich, seized the moment to try to
persuade Hitler to agree to a merger of the NSDAP and DVFP
fractions in the Reichstag, and in the second meeting even to full
unity of the two parties. Hitler equivocated. He agreed in principle,
but stipulated preconditions that needed to be discussed with
Graefe. One of these, it transpired, was that the headquarters of the
movement would be based in Munich. Hitler was in difficulties
because, though he had always insisted on a separate and unique
identity for the NSDAP, there was the danger, following the
electoral success of the Volkischer Block, that such an
uncompromising stance would seem less than compelling to his

supporters. Moreover, the DVFP was the stronger of the two
parties, as the election had shown, and Ludendorff was now
generally regarded as the leading figure in the volkisch movement.

Some north German Nazis were, not surprisingly, confused and
uncertain about Hitler’s position regarding any merger. In a letter
of 14 June, Haase, the Nazi leader in Gottingen, sought
confirmation that Hitler rejected a merger of the two parties.
Replying two days later, Hitler denied that he had fundamentally
rejected a merger, though he had stipulated preconditions for such a
step. He acknowledged the opposition among many Nazi loyalists to
a merger with the DVFP, which, he also pointed out, had made
plain its rejection of some of the old guard of the party. Under the
circumstances, he went on, he could no longer intervene or accept
responsibility. He had decided, therefore, to withdraw from politics
until he could properly lead again. He refused henceforth to allow
his name to be used in support of any political position, and asked
for no further political letters to be sent to him.

Hitler announced his decision to withdraw from politics in the
press on 7 July. He requested no further visits to Landsberg by his
supporters, a request he felt compelled to repeat a month later. The
press announcement gave as his reasons the impossibility of
accepting practical responsibility for developments while he was in
Landsberg, ‘general overwork’, and the need to concentrate on the
writing of his book (the first volume of Mein Kampf ). A not
insignificant additional factor, as the opposition press emphasized,
was Hitler’s anxiety to do nothing to jeopardize his chances of
parole, which could be granted from 1 October. His withdrawal was
not a machiavellian strategy to exacerbate the split that was already
taking place, increase confusion, and thereby bolster his image as a
symbol of unity. This was the outcome, not the cause. In June 1924,
the outcome could not be clearly foreseen. Hitler acted from
weakness, not strength. He was being pressed from all sides to take
a stance on the growing schism. His equivocation frustrated his
supporters. But any clear stance would have alienated one side or
the other. His decision not to decide was characteristic.

Hitler’s frustration was also increased by his inability, despite his
outright disapproval, to curtail Rohm’s determination to build up a
nationwide paramilitary organization called the Frontbann. Unable
to deter Rohm - already freed on 1 April, bound over on probation,
his derisory fifteen-month prison sentence for his part in the putsch
set aside on condition of good behaviour — Hitler ended their last
meeting before he left Landsberg, on 17 June, by telling him that,
having laid down the leadership of the National Socialist Movement,
he wished to hear no more about the Frontbann. Rohm nevertheless
simply ignored Hitler, and pressed on with his plans, looking to
Ludendorff for patronage and protection.

A much-vaunted conference in Weimar on 15-17 August,
intended to cement the organizational merger of the NSDAP and
DVFP, produced only the most superficial unity in a newly-
proclaimed National Socialist Freedom Movement
(Nationalsozialistische Freiheitsbewegung, NSFB). By the end of the
summer, the fragmentation of the NSDAP, and of the volkisch
movement in general, was, despite all the talk of merger and unity,
advancing rather than receding. Only Hitler’s position was emerging
significantly strengthened by the inner-party warfare.

As summer dragged into autumn, then winter approached, the
rifts in the volkisch movement widened still further. From the
NSFB’s point of view, unity without Hitler, and in the face of his
continued refusal to commit himself publicly to a unified
organization, was impossible. In Bavaria, the volkisch feud
surrounding the figures of Esser and Streicher widened into open
breach. On 26 October, the Volkischer Block decided to join the
NSFB to create a united organization to fight the coming elections.
With this, it accepted the NSFB’s Reich Leadership. Gregor Strasser,
the spokesman of the Volkischer Block, hoped that the
Grof$deutsche Volksgemeinschaft would also soon join the NSFB,
but at the same time openly condemned its leaders, Esser and
Streicher. Esser’s reply in a letter to all GVG affiliations, a bitter
attack on the leaders of the Volkischer Block, with a side-swipe at
Ludendorff for his support of the Block’s position, reaffirmed the

Munich loyalist position: ‘the only man who has a right to exclude
someone who has fought for years for his place in the Movement of
National Socialists is solely and singly Adolf Hitler.’ But Esser’s
bravado, and the brash attacks of Streicher, supported by the
Thuringian National Socialist, Artur Dinter, could not conceal the
sharp decline of the GVG.

The Reichstag elections that took place on 7 December
demonstrated just how marginal this perpetual squabbling in the
volkisch movement was to the overall shaping of German politics.
The NSFB won only 3 per cent of the vote. It had lost over a million
votes compared with the volkisch showing in the May election. Its
Reichstag representation fell from thirty-two to fourteen seats, only
four of whom were National Socialists. It was a disastrous result.
But it pleased Hitler. In his absence, volkisch politics had collapsed,
but his own claims to leadership had, in the process, been
strengthened. The election result also had the advantage of
encouraging the Bavarian government to regard the danger from
the extreme Right as past. There was now, it seemed, no need for
undue concern about Hitler’s release from Landsberg, for which his
supporters had been clamouring since October.

Only political bias explains the determination of the Bavarian
judiciary to insist upon Hitler’s early release, despite the well-
reasoned opposition of the Munich police and the state prosecutor’s
office. On 20 December, at 12.15 p.m., he was released. A
calculation in the files of the state prosecution office noted that he
had three years, 333 days, twenty-one hours, fifty minutes of his
short sentence still to serve. History would have taken a different
course had he been made to serve it.

The prison staff, all sympathetic to Hitler, gathered to bid their
famous prisoner an emotional farewell. He paused for photographs
by the gates of the old fortress town, hurrying his photographer,
Heinrich Hoffmann, because of the cold, then was gone. Within two
hours, he was back at his Munich apartment in Thierschstrafse,
greeted by friends with garlands of flowers, and nearly knocked
over by his dog, Wolf. Hitler said later that he did not know what

to do with his first evening of freedom. Politically, he continued at
first to remain publicly non-committal. He needed to take stock of
the situation in view of the months of internecine warfare in the
volkisch movement. More important, it was necessary in order to
establish with the Bavarian authorities the conditions for his re-
entry into politics and to ensure that the ban on the NSDAP was
lifted. Now that he was released, serious preparation for his party’s
new start could begin.

‘Landsberg’, Hitler told Hans Frank, was his ‘university paid for by
the state’. He read, he said, everything he could get hold of:
Nietzsche, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Ranke, Treitschke, Marx,
Bismarck’s Gedanken und Erinnerungen (Thoughts and Memories), and
the war memoirs of German and Allied generals and statesmen.
Other than dealing with visitors and answering correspondence —
neither of which preoccupied him much once he had withdrawn
from public involvement in politics in the summer — the long days
of enforced idleness in Landsberg were ideal for reading and
reflection. But Hitler’s reading and reflection were anything but
academic. Doubtless he did read much. However, reading, for him,
had purely an instrumental purpose. He read not for knowledge or
enlightenment, but for confirmation of his own preconceptions. He
found what he was looking for. As he remarked to Hans Frank — the
party’s legal expert who would eventually become Governor
General in occupied Poland — through the reading he did in
Landsberg, ‘I recognized the correctness of my views.’

Sitting in his cell in Nuremberg many years later, Frank adjudged
the year 1924 to have been one of the most decisive turning-points
in Hitler’s life. This was an exaggeration. Landsberg was not so
much a turning-point as a period in which Hitler inwardly
consolidated and rationalized for himself the ‘world-view’ he had
been developing since 1919 and, in some significant ways,
modifying in the year or so before the putsch. As the Nazi

Movement fell apart in his absence, and with time on his hands,
away from the hurly-burly of active politics, Hitler could scarcely
avoid ruminating on past mistakes. And, expecting his release
within months, he was even more strongly compelled to look to the
way forward for himself and his broken movement. During this
time, he revised in certain respects his views on how to attain
power. In so doing, his perception of himself changed. He came to
think of his own role in a different way. In the wake of the triumph
of his trial, he began to see himself, as his followers had started to
portray him from the end of 1922 onwards, as Germany’s saviour.
In the light of the putsch, one might have expected his self-belief to
be crushed once and for all. On the contrary: it was elevated beyond
measure. His almost mystical faith in himself as walking with
destiny, with a ‘mission’ to rescue Germany, dates from this time.

At the same time, there was an important adjustment to another
aspect of his ‘world-view’. Ideas which had been taking shape in his
mind since late 1922, if not earlier, on the direction of future
foreign policy were now elaborated into the notion of a quest for
‘living space’, to be gained at the expense of Russia. Blended into
his obsessive antisemitism, aimed at the destruction of ‘Jewish
Bolshevism’, the concept of a war for ‘living space’ — an idea which
Hitler would repeatedly emphasize in the following years — rounded
off his ‘world-view’. Thereafter, there would be tactical
adjustments, but no further alteration of substance. Landsberg was
no ‘Jordan conversion’ for Hitler. In the main, it was a matter of
adding new emphases to the few basic idées fixes already formed, at
least in embryo, or clearly taking shape in the years before the
putsch.

The modifications in Hitler’s ‘world-view’ that were already
forming in the year before the putsch are clearly evident in Mein
Kampf. Hitler’s book offered nothing new. But it was the plainest
and most expansive statement of his ‘world-view’ that he had
presented. He acknowledged that without his stay in Landsberg the
book which after 1933 (though not before) would sell in its millions
would never have been written. No doubt he hoped for financial

gain from the book. But his main motivation was the need he felt,
as during his trial, to demonstrate his own special calling, and to
justify his programme as the only possible way of rescuing Germany
from the catastrophe brought about by the ‘November Criminals’.

Hitler was already at work on what would become the first
volume by May 1924, building upon ideas formed during and
immediately after his trial. He called his book at that time by the
scarcely catchy title ‘Four and a Half Years of Struggle against Lies,
Stupidity, and Cowardice’, which gave way to the more pithy Mein
Kampf (My Struggle) only in spring 1925. By then, the book had
undergone major structural changes. The initial intention of a
‘reckoning’ with the ‘traitors’ responsible for his downfall in 1923
never materialized. Instead, the first volume, which appeared on 18
July 1925, was largely autobiographical — though with many
distortions and inaccuracies — ending with Hitler’s triumph at the
announcement of the Party Programme in the Hofbrauhaus on 24
February 1920. The second volume, written after his release and
published on 11 December 1926, dealt more extensively with his
ideas on the nature of the volkisch state, questions of ideology,
propaganda, and organization, concluding with chapters on foreign
policy.

The presumption, widespread at the time and persisting later,
that Hitler at first dictated the indigestible prose to his chauffeur
and general dogsbody, Emil Maurice, later to Rudolf Hef8 (both of
whom were also serving sentences for their part in the putsch), is
wide of the mark. Hitler typed the drafts of the first volume himself
(though some of the second volume was dictated to a secretary).
Badly written and rambling as the published version of Mein Kampf
was, the text had, in fact, been subjected to innumerable stylistic
‘improvements’ since the original composition. The typescript was
read by the culture critic of the Volkischer Beobachter, Josef Stolzing-
Cerny, and at least parts of it by the future wife of Rudolf Hels, Ilse
Prohl. Both made editorial changes. Others were by Hitler himself.
According to Hans Frank, Hitler accepted that the book was badly

written, and described it as no more than a collection of leading
articles for the Volkischer Beobachter.

Before Hitler came to power, Mein Kampf, brought out in the
party’s own publishing house, the Franz Eher-Verlag, run by Max
Amann, was scarcely the runaway bestseller he had apparently
expected it to be. Its turgid content, dreadful style, and relatively
high price of 12 Reich Marks a volume evidently deterred many
potential readers. By 1929, the first volume had sold around 23,000
copies, the second only 13,000. Sales increased sharply following
the NSDAP’s electoral successes after 1930, and reached 80,000 in
1932. From 1933, they rose stratospherically. One and a half
million copies were sold that year. Even the blind could read it —
should they have wished to do so — once a braille version had been
published in 1936. And from that year, a copy of the people’s
edition of both volumes bound together was given to each happy
couple on their wedding day. Some 10 million copies were sold by
1945, not counting the millions sold abroad, where Mein Kampf was
translated into sixteen languages. How many people actually read it
is unknown. For Hitler, it was of little importance. Having from the
early 1920s described himself in official documents as a ‘writer’, he
could well afford in 1933 to refuse his Reich Chancellor’s salary (in
contrast, he pointed out, to his predecessors): Mein Kampf had made
him a very rich man.

No policy outline was offered in Mein Kampf. But the book did
provide, however garbled the presentation, an uncompromising
statement of Hitler’s political principles, his ‘world-view’, his sense
of his own ‘mission’, his ‘vision’ of society, and his long-term aims.
Not least, it established the basis of the Fithrer myth. For in Mein
Kampf, Hitler portrayed himself as uniquely qualified to lead
Germany from its existing misery to greatness.

Mein Kampf gives an important insight into his thinking in the
mid-1920s. By then, he had developed a philosophy that afforded
him a complete interpretation of history, of the ills of the world,
and how to overcome them. Tersely summarized, it boiled down to
a simplistic, Manichean view of history as racial struggle, in which

the highest racial entity, the aryan, was being undermined and
destroyed by the lowest, the parasitic Jew. ‘The racial question,’ he
wrote, ‘gives the key not only to world history but to all human
culture.’ The culmination of this process was taken to be the brutal
rule of the Jews through Bolshevism in Russia, where the ‘blood
Jew’ had, ‘partly amid inhuman torture killed or let starve to death
around 30 million people in truly satanic savagery in order to
secure the rule over a great people of a bunch of Jewish literati and
stock-market bandits’. The ‘mission’ of the Nazi Movement was,
therefore, clear: to destroy ‘Jewish Bolshevism’. At the same time —
a leap of logic that moved conveniently into a justification for
outright imperialist conquest — this would provide the German
people with the ‘living space’ needed for the ‘master race’ to sustain
itself. He held rigidly to these basic tenets for the rest of his life.
Nothing of substance changed in later years. The very inflexibility
and quasi-messianic commitment to an ‘idea’, a set of beliefs that
were unalterable, simple, internally consistent, and comprehensive,
gave Hitler the strength of will and sense of knowing his own
destiny that left its mark on all those who came into contact with
him. Hitler’s authority in his entourage derived in no small measure
from the certainty in his own convictions that he could so forcefully
express. Everything could be couched in terms of black and white,
victory or total destruction. There were no alternatives. And, like
all ideologues and ‘conviction politicians’, the self-reinforcing
components of his ‘world-view’ meant that he was always in a
position to deride or dismiss out of hand any ‘rational’ arguments of
opponents. Once head of state, Hitler’s personalized ‘world-view’
would serve as ‘guidelines for action’ for policy-makers in all areas
of the Third Reich.

Hitler’s book was not a prescriptive programme in the sense of a
short-term political manifesto. But many contemporaries made a
mistake in treating Mein Kampf with ridicule and not taking the
ideas Hitler expressed there extremely seriously. However base and
repellent they were, they amounted to a set of clearly established
and rigidly upheld political principles. Hitler never saw any reason

to alter the content of what he had written. Their internal coherence
(given the irrational premises) allows them to be described as an
ideology (or, in Hitler’s own terminology, a ‘world-view’). Hitler’s
‘world-view’ in Mein Kampf can now be more clearly seen than used
to be possible in the context of his ideas as they unfolded between
his entry into politics and the writing of his ‘Second Book’ in 1928.

On Hitler’s central, overriding, and all-embracing obsession, the
‘removal of the Jews’, Mein Kampf added nothing to the ideas he
had already formulated by 1919-20. Extreme though the language
of Mein Kampf was, it was no different to that which he had been
proclaiming for years. Nor, for that matter, did the inherently
genocidal terminology substantially vary from that of other writers
and speakers on the volkisch Right, extending well back beyond the
First World War. His bacterial imagery implied that Jews should be
treated in the way germs were dealt with: by extermination.
Already in August 1920, Hitler had spoken of combating ‘racial
tuberculosis’ through removal of the ‘causal agent, the Jew’. And
there could be little doubt whom Hitler had in mind when, four
years later in Mein Kampf, he wrote: ‘The nationalization of our
masses will succeed only when, aside from all the positive struggle
for the soul of our people, their international poisoners are
exterminated.’ The notion of poisoning the poisoners ran through
another, notorious, passage of Mein Kampf, in which Hitler
suggested that if 12-15,000 ‘Hebrew corrupters of the people’ had
been held under poison gas at the start of the First World War, then
‘the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain’.
These terrible passages are not the beginning of a one-way track to
the ‘Final Solution’. The road there was ‘twisted’, not straight. But
however little he had thought out the practical implications of what
he was saying, its inherent genocidal thrust is undeniable. However
indistinctly, the connection between destruction of the Jews, war,
and national salvation had been forged in Hitler’s mind.

As we remarked, the initial anti-capitalist colouring of Hitler’s
antisemitism had given way by mid-1920 to the connection in his
mind of the Jews with the evils of Soviet Bolshevism. It was not

that Hitler substituted the image of the Jews behind Marxism for
that of the Jews behind capitalism. Both coexisted in his fixated
loathing. It was a hatred so profound that it could only have been
based on deep fear. This was of a figure in his mind so powerful
that it was the force behind both international finance capital and
Soviet Communism. It was the image of a ‘Jewish world conspiracy
that was almost unconquerable — even for National Socialism.

Once the link with Bolshevism was made, Hitler had established
his central and lasting vision of a titanic battle for supremacy, a
racial struggle against a foe of ruthless brutality. What he
visualized, he had stated in June 1922, was a fight to the death
between two competing ideologies, the idealistic and the
materialistic. The mission of the German people was to destroy
Bolshevism, and with it ‘our mortal enemy: the Jew’. By October
the same year he was writing of a life and death struggle of two
opposed world-views, incapable of existing alongside one another.
Defeat in this great showdown would seal Germany’s destruction.
The struggle would leave only victors and the annihilated. It meant
a war of extermination. ‘A victory of the Marxist idea signifies the
complete extermination of the opponents,’ he remarked. ‘The
Bolshevization of Germany ... means the complete annihilation of
the entire Christian-western culture.’ Correspondingly, the aim of
National Socialism could be simply defined: ‘Annihilation and
extermination of the Marxist Weltanschauung.’

By now Marxism and the Jew were synonymous in Hitler’s mind.
At the end of his trial, on 27 March 1924, he had told the court that
what he wanted to be was the breaker of Marxism. The Nazi
Movement knew only one enemy, he had emphasized the following
month — the mortal enemy of the whole of mankind: Marxism.
There was no mention of the Jews. Some newspapers picked up the
change of emphasis and claimed Hitler had altered his position on
the ‘Jewish Question’. There were Nazi followers who were also
puzzled. One, visiting him in Landsberg at the end of July, asked
Hitler whether he had changed his views about Jewry. He received
a characteristic reply. Indeed his position on the struggle against

Jewry had altered, Hitler remarked. He had realized while at work
on Mein Kampf that he had up to then been too mild. In future, only
the toughest measures could be deployed if success were to be
attained. The ‘Jewish Question’, he declared, was an existential
matter for all peoples, not just the German people, ‘for Juda is the
world plague’. The logic of the position was that only the complete
eradication of the international power of Jewry would suffice.

Hitler’s obsession with the ‘Jewish Question’ was inextricably
interwoven with his notions of foreign policy. Once his antisemitism
had, by the middle of 1920, fused with anti-Bolshevism into the
image of ‘Jewish Bolshevism’, it was inevitable that his thinking on
foreign policy would be affected. However, not only ideological
influences, but questions of pure power politics shaped Hitler’s
changing position. In their concentration on France as the arch-
enemy, hostility to Britain, recovery of colonies, and the restoration
of Germany’s borders of 1914, Hitler’s early views on foreign policy
were conventionally pan-German. They were no different from
those of many nationalist hotheads. In fact, in essence (if not in the
extreme way they were advanced) they accorded with a revisionism
that enjoyed wide popular backing. Nor, in his emphasis on military
might to overthrow Versailles and defeat France, however
unrealistic it sounded in the early 1920s, did he differ from many
others on the Pan-German and volkisch Right. Already in 1920,
before he had heard of Fascism, he was contemplating the value of
an alliance with Italy. He was determined even then that the
question of South Tyrol — the predominantly German-speaking part
of the former Austrian province of Tyrol lying beyond the Brenner,
ceded to Italy in 1919, and since then subjected to a programme of
‘Italianization’ — would not stand in the way of such an alliance. By
late 1922, an alliance with Britain, whose world empire he admired,
was in his mind. This idea had sharpened in 1923 when the
disagreements of the British and French over the Ruhr occupation
became clear.

The presumed rule of the Jews in Russia stood, on the other
hand, as Hitler had pointed out as early as July 1920, firmly in the

way of any alliance with Russia. Even so, at this time Hitler shared
the view of many on the volkisch Right that a distinction could be
drawn between ‘national’ Russians — where the Germanic influence
was strong — and the ‘bolshevization’ of Russia brought about by the
Jews. Hitler’s approach to Russia was probably in part shaped by
Rosenberg, the early NSDAP’s leading ‘expert’ on eastern questions,
whose Baltic origins fed a ferocious antipathy towards Bolshevism.
It was, most likely, reinforced by Scheubner-Richter, another
prolific writer on eastern policy in the infant party, with extremely
strong connections to Russian exiles. Dietrich Eckart, too, who was
already in early 1919 writing of the identity of Jewry and
Bolshevism, probably also exerted some influence.

Russia was coming already before the putsch to loom larger in
Hitler’s thoughts on foreign policy. He had somewhat vaguely
mentioned the ‘land question’, comparing Germany unfavourably
with Russia in its relation of population to the land at its disposal,
as early as December 1919. He hinted in a speech on 31 May 1921,
through praise of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty of 1918 (which had
ended Russian participation in the war) for giving Germany the
additional land it needed to sustain its people, at an expansion of
German ‘living space’ at the expense of Russia. On 21 October 1921
he was still speaking, somewhat cryptically, of an expansion with
Russia against England opening up ‘an unlimited possibility of
expansion towards the east’. Such remarks indicated that at this
time, Hitler still shared — even if vaguely expressed — the Pan-
German view on eastern expansion. This amounted broadly to the
notion that eastern expansion could be carried out through
collaboration with a non-Bolshevik Russia, whose own territorial
demands would be settled also through looking eastwards, towards
Asia, leaving the former Russian border areas in the west to
Germany. It would have amounted, essentially, to something like a
resurrection of the Brest-Litovsk arrangement, while Russia would
have been left to find compensation in the lands on its own eastern
borders.

By early 1922, these views had shifted. By now, Hitler had
abandoned any idea of collaboration with Russia. He saw no
prospect of Russia looking only eastwards. Extension of Bolshevism
to Germany would prove an irresistible urge. The logic of the
changed position was evident. Only through the destruction of
Bolshevism could Germany be saved. And at the same time, this —
through expansion into Russia itself - would bring the territory
which Germany needed. During the course of 1922 — perhaps
reinforced towards the end of the year by contact with the arch-
expansionist, Ludendorff — the changed approach to future policy
towards Russia was consolidated. By December 1922, Hitler was
explaining in private to Eduard Scharrer, co-owner of the Muinchner
Neueste Nachrichten and favourably disposed towards the Nazi Party,
the outline of the foreign alliance ideas which he was to elaborate
in Mein Kampf. He ruled out the colonial rivalry with Britain that
had caused conflict before the First World War. He told Scharrer:

Germany would have to adapt herself to a purely continental policy, avoiding harm to
English interest. The destruction of Russia with the help of England would have to be
attempted. Russia would give Germany sufficient land for German settlers and a wide field
of activity for German industry. Then England would not interrupt us in our reckoning
with France.

In the light of his comments to Scharrer, it can scarcely be claimed
that Hitler developed an entirely new concept of foreign policy
while in Landsberg, one based on the idea of war against Russia to
acquire Lebensraum. And what he wrote in Mein Kampf on
Germany’s need for land being satisfied at the expense of Russia had
indeed already been anticipated in an essay he wrote in spring
1924, which was published in April that year. There was no
‘transformation’ of Hitler’s ‘vision of the world’ in Landsberg. What
he came to write in Landsberg was the result of the gradual
gestation of his ideas, rather than a flash of intuition, set of new
insights, or overnight conversion to a different approach.

The imperialist and geopolitical ideas that went to make up the
idea of Lebensraum were, in fact, common currency on the
imperialist and volkisch Right in Weimar Germany. The idea of

Lebensraum had been a prominent strand of German imperialist
ideology since the 1890s. It had been strongly represented in the
Pan-German League under Heinrich Clas, supported by the press
controlled by founder-member of the League, director of Krupp’s,
and media tycoon Alfred Hugenberg. For Pan-Germans, Lebensraum
could both justify territorial conquest by evoking the colonizing of
Slav lands by Teutonic knights in the Middle Ages and, emotively,
conjure up notions of uniting in the Reich what came to be
described as Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans) scattered throughout
eastern Europe. For the most part these constituted fairly small
minorities, as in the parts of Poland (outside the towns) which
Prussia had ruled before 1918. But in a number of areas — Danzig,
for example, parts of the Baltic, or the area of Czechoslovakia later
known as the Sudetenland — the German-speaking population was
sizeable, and often vociferously nationalist. The idea of Lebensraum
symbolized, then, for Pan-Germans the historic conquest of the East
while at the same time, in emphasizing German alleged over-
population, cloaking real, modern, power-political imperialist
ambitions. It existed alongside, rather than blending with, the
mainstream imperialist concentration on overseas trading colonies,
encapsulated in the slogan of Weltpolitik. In the Weimar era it came
to be popularized by Hans Grimm’s best-selling novel Volk ohne
Raum (People without Space), published in 1926.

Hitler could scarcely have avoided the imperialist and
geopolitical writings in circulation on ‘living space’. Among them,
whether read at first hand or in bowdlerized form, it seems highly
likely that those of Karl Haushofer, the leading exponent of
‘geopolitics’, were one significant source for his notion of
Lebensraum. Through Rudolf Hefg, Hitler already knew Haushofer
by 1922 at the latest. Haushofer’s influence was probably greater
than the Munich professor was later prepared to acknowledge. If he
was not acquainted with them before, Hitler certainly had time on
his hands while in prison to read his works, as well as those of
Friedrich Ratzel, the other foremost geopolitics theorist. Whether he
did so cannot be proved. But it seems at the very least likely that

the broad lines of their arguments were made known to him by
Haushofer’s former pupil, Rudolf Hels.

At any rate, by the time of the Scharrer discussion at the end of
1922, Hitler’s thinking on Russia and the ‘living space’ question was
essentially in place. And by spring 1924, his views were effectively
fully formed. What Landsberg and the writing of Mein Kampf did
was to provide elaboration. Beyond that, it showed that Hitler had
by then firmly established the link between the destruction of the
Jews and a war against Russia to acquire Lebensraum.

Already in the first volume of Mein Kampf, the choice — which
Hitler had still rhetorically left open in his article of April 1924 — of
a land-policy directed against Russia, with Britain’s support, or a
world trading policy upheld by sea-power directed against Britain
with Russia’s support, was emphatically determined. By the second
volume, mainly written in 1925, the enemy in the short term was
still seen as France. But in the baldest language, the long-term goal
was now stated to be the attaining of ‘living space’ at the expense of
Russia.

We National Socialists consciously draw a line beneath the foreign policy tendency of our
pre-War period. We take up where we broke off six hundred years ago. We stop the endless
German movement to the south and west, and turn our gaze towards the land in the east.
At long last we break off the colonial and commercial policy of the pre-War period and shift
to the soil policy of the future.

If we speak of soil in Europe today, we can primarily have in mind only Russia and her
vassal border states ... For centuries Russia drew nourishment from [the] Germanic nucleus
of its upper leading strata. Today it can be regarded as almost totally exterminated and
extinguished. It has been replaced by the Jew ... He himself is no element of organization,
but a ferment of decomposition. The giant empire in the east is ripe for collapse. And the
end of Jewish rule in Russia will also be the end of Russia as a state ...

The mission of the National Socialist Movement was to prepare the
German people for this task. ‘We have been chosen by Fate,’ wrote
Hitler, ‘as witnesses of a catastrophe which will be the mightiest
confirmation of the soundness of the volkisch theory.’

With this passage, the two key components of Hitler’s
personalized ‘world-view’ — destruction of the Jews and acquisition
of ‘living space’ — came together. War against Russia would,

through its annihilation of ‘Jewish Bolshevism’, at the same time
deliver Germany its salvation by providing new ‘living space’.
Crude, simplistic, barbaric: but this invocation of the most brutal
tenets of late nineteenth-century imperialism, racism, and
antisemitism, transposed into eastern Europe in the twentieth
century, was a heady brew for those ready to consume it.

Hitler himself repeatedly returned to the ‘living space’ notion,
which became a dominant theme of his writings and speeches in the
following years. His foreign-policy ideas were to be more clearly
laid out, but in no significant way altered, in his ‘Second Book’,
written in 1928 (though left unpublished in Hitler’s own lifetime).
Once established, the quest for Lebensraum — and with it the
destruction of ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ — would remain a keystone of
Hitler’s ideology. One element remained to complete the ‘world-
view’: the leader of genius who would accomplish this quest. In
Landsberg, Hitler found the answer.

Ill

Many years later, Hitler regarded ‘the self-confidence, optimism,
and belief that simply could not be shaken by anything more’ as
deriving from his time in Landsberg. His self-perception did indeed
alter while he was in prison. Even at his trial, as we have seen, he
had been proud to be the ‘drummer’ of the national cause. Anything
else was a triviality, he had declared. In Landsberg this changed —
though, as noted, the change had already been under way during
the year preceding the putsch.

Hitler was preoccupied from the beginning of his sentence with
the question of his own future and that of his party after his release.
Since he expected his release within six months, the question was an
urgent one. For Hitler, there was no turning back. His political
‘career’, which had developed into his political ‘mission’, left him
nowhere to go but forwards. He could not return to anonymity,
even had he wanted to do so. A conventional ‘bourgeois’ lifestyle
was out of the question. Any retreat, after the acclaim he had won

on the nationalist Right at his trial, would have confirmed the
impression of his opponents that he was a figure of farce, and would
have exposed him to ridicule. And as he pondered over the failed
putsch, transforming it in his mind into the martyrs’ triumph that
would come to have its central place in Nazi mythology, he had no
trouble in assigning the blame to the mistakes, weakness, and lack
of resolve of all the leading figures to whom he was at the time
bound. They had betrayed him, and the national cause: this was his
conclusion. More than that: the triumph at his trial; the torrents of
adulation ever-present in the volkisch press or pouring unabated
from letters sent to Landsberg; and not least the collapse of the
volkisch movement in his absence into derisory sectarian squabbling,
and the growing conflict with Ludendorff and the other volkisch
leaders; all these contributed towards giving him an elevated sense
of his own importance and of his unique historic ‘mission’. The idea,
embryonically forming in 1923, took firm hold in the strange
atmosphere of Landsberg. Surrounded by sycophants and devotees,
foremost among them the fawning Hefg, Hitler now became certain:
he himself was Germany’s coming ‘great leader’.

Such a notion in its full implications was unimaginable before his
triumph at the trial and the acclaim that followed. The ‘heroic’
leadership he now claimed for himself was an invention of his
followers before he saw himself in that role. But the role fitted the
temperament of one whose personal failures in early life had found
an exaggerated wish-fulfilment in unbound admiration for heroic
figures, above all the artist-hero Wagner. Whether an extraordinary
depth of self-loathing is a necessary precondition for such an
abnormal elevation of self-esteem into that of the heroic saviour of
the nation is a matter best left to psychologists. But whatever the
deep-seated reasons, for such a narcissistic egomaniac as Hitler, the
hero-worship which others directed towards him, combined with his
own inability to find fault or error in himself, now produced a
‘heroic’-leadership self-image of monumental proportions. No one in
mainstream German political life, outside the tiny and fractured
volkisch movement, was aware of or would have taken seriously the

change in Hitler’s self-perception. At the time it was of no
consequence. But for Hitler’s demands on the volkisch movement,
and for his own self-justification, it was a vital development.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler pictured himself as a rare genius who
combined the qualities of the ‘programmatist’ and the ‘politician’.
The ‘programmatist’ of a movement was the theoretician who did
not concern himself with practical realities, but with ‘eternal truth’,
as the great religious leaders had done. The ‘greatness’ of the
‘politician’ lay in the successful practical implementation of the
‘idea’ advanced by the ‘programmatist’. ‘Over long periods of
humanity,’ he wrote, ‘it can once happen that the politician is
wedded to the programmatist.’ His work did not concern short-term
demands that any petty-bourgeois could grasp, but looked to the
future, with ‘aims which only the fewest grasp’. Among the ‘great
men’ in history, Hitler singled out at this point Luther, Frederick the
Great, and Wagner. Seldom was it the case, in his view, that ‘a great
theoretician’ was also ‘a great leader’. The latter was far more
frequently ‘an agitator’: ‘For leading means: being able to move
masses.’ He concluded: ‘the combination of theoretician, organizer,
and leader in one person is the rarest thing that can be found on this
earth; this combination makes the great man.’ Unmistakably, Hitler
meant himself.

The ‘idea’ he stood for was not a matter of short-term objectives.
It was a ‘mission’, a ‘vision’ of long-term future goals, and of his
own part in the accomplishment of them. Certainly, these goals —
national salvation through ‘removal’ of the Jews and acquisition of
‘living space’ in the east — did not amount to short-term practical
policy guidelines. But, incorporated into the notion of the ‘heroic’
leader, they did amount to a dynamic ‘world-view’. This ‘world-
view’ gave Hitler his unremitting drive. He spoke repeatedly of his
‘mission’. He saw the hand of ‘Providence’ in his work. He regarded
his fight against the Jew as ‘the work of the Lord’. He saw his life’s
work as a crusade. The invasion of the Soviet Union, when it was
launched many years later, was for him — and not just for him — the
culmination of this crusade. It would be a serious error to

underestimate the ideological driving-force of Hitler’s few central
ideas. He was no mere propagandist or ‘unprincipled opportunist’.
He was indeed both a masterly propagandist and an ideologue.
There was no contradiction between the two.

When he left Landsberg, to try to rebuild a crippled movement,
Hitler’s leadership claims were, therefore, not only externally
enhanced within the volkisch movement, but had been inwardly
transformed and consolidated into a new perception of himself and
awareness of his role. His sense of realism had by no means
altogether disappeared beneath his messianic claims. He had no
concrete notion of how his aims might be achieved. He still
imagined that his goals might be brought to fruition only in the
distant future. Since it consisted of only a few basic, but
unchangeable tenets, his ‘world-view’ was compatible with short-
term tactical adjustments. And it had the advantage of
accommodating and reconciling a variety of otherwise conflicting
positions on particular issues and fine points of ideology adopted by
subordinate Nazi leaders. Within the framework of his basic ‘world-
view’, Hitler himself was flexible, even indifferent, towards
ideological issues which could obsess his followers. Opponents at
the time, and many later commentators, frequently underestimated
the dynamism of Nazi ideology because of its diffuseness, and
because of the cynicism of Nazi propaganda. Ideology was often
regarded as no more than a cloak for power-ambitions and tyranny.
This was to misinterpret the driving-force of Hitler’s own basic
ideas, few and crude as they were. And it is to misunderstand the
ways those basic ideas came to function within the Nazi Party, then,
after 1933, within the Nazi state. What mattered for Hitler was
indeed the road to power. He was prepared to sacrifice most
principles for that. But some — and those were for him the ones that
counted — were not only unchangeable. They formed the essence of
what he understood by power itself. Opportunism was always itself
ultimately shaped by the core ideas that determined his notion of
power.

Following his months in Landsberg, Hitler’s self-belief was now
such that, unlike the pre-putsch era, he could regard himself as the
exclusive exponent of the ‘idea’ of National Socialism and the sole
leader of the volkisch movement, destined to show Germany the
path to its national salvation. The task facing him on release would
be to convince others of that.

7
Mastery over the Movement

Hitler spent Christmas Eve 1924 at the Hanfstaengls’ in their
splendid new villa in Munich’s Herzogpark. He had put on weight
during his time in prison, and looked a little flabby. His blue suit
was flecked with dandruff on the collar and shoulders. Four-year-old
Egon Hanfstaengl was glad to see his ‘Uncle Dolf’ again. Within two
minutes, Hitler was asking to hear Isolde’s ‘Liebestod’ on
Hanfstaengl’s elegant Bliithner grand piano. Wagner’s music, as
Hanfstaengl had often noticed, could transform Hitler’s mood. His
initial nervousness and tension disappeared. He became relaxed and
cheerful. He admired the new house, then suddenly stopped in mid-
sentence, glanced over his shoulder, and explained that he had not
lost his habit from prison of imagining he was being observed
through the peephole. It was, as Hanfstaengl realized, a pathetic
piece of play-acting. Putzi had seen Hitler in Landsberg, relaxed and
comfortable; and there had been no peephole in his room. He
noticed that Hitler had a good appetite during the meal of turkey
followed by his favourite Viennese sweet pastries, but that he
scarcely touched the wine. Hitler subsequently explained that he
had begun on leaving Landsberg to cut out meat and alcohol in
order to lose weight. He had convinced himself that meat and
alcohol were harmful for him, and, ‘in his fanatical way’, went on
Hanfstaengl, ‘finally made a dogma out of it and from then on only
took vegetarian meals and alcohol-free drinks’. After the meal,
Hitler treated the family to his war-memories, marching up and
down the room, imitating the sounds of different sorts of artillery
fire at the battle of the Somme. Late in the evening, a well-

connected artist, Wilhelm Funk, dropped in at the Hanfstaengls’. He
had known Hitler for quite some time, and now ventured his views
on how the party could be built up again. Hitler replied in a
familiar, and revealing, tone. For one who had ‘come up from the
bottom’, he said, ‘without name, special position, or connection’, it
was less a matter of programmes than hard endeavour until the
public was ready to see ‘a nameless one’ as identical with a political
line. Hitler thought he had now reached that position, and that the
putsch had been of value to the movement: ‘I’m no longer an
unknown, and that provides us with the best basis for a new start.’

The new start was Hitler’s priority. The immediate aim was to
have the ban on the NSDAP lifted. His first political act was to call
on his old ally Ernst Pohner, the former Munich Police President.
Through a well-placed intermediary, Theodor Freiherr von Cramer-
Klett, a meeting with the Bavarian Minister President Heinrich Held
was arranged for 4 January. Pohner was also influential in
persuading Franz Girtner, the Bavarian Minister of Justice (whom
Hitler was to make Reich Minister of Justice in 1933), to have the
other Nazis detained in Landsberg released, among them Rudolf
Hef.

The meeting with Minister President Held on 4 January, only a
fortnight after Hitler’s release and the first of three meetings
between the two, went well. No one else was present. Hitler was
prepared to act humbly. He agreed to respect the authority of the
state without condition, and to support it in the struggle against
Communism. He distanced himself sharply from Ludendorff’s
attacks on the Catholic Church, a necessary step since the General’s
vociferous anti-clericalism — scarcely a winning formula in Bavaria —
had recently become notably strident, and linked to an all too public
row (involving a court case for libel, which Ludendorff lost) with
Rupprecht, the Crown Prince of Bavaria. Behind the public facade of
continued reverence for the figurehead of the volkisch movement,
Hitler’s willingness during his meeting with the Bavarian premier to
dissociate himself from Ludendorff was not only shrewd, but also a

sign of his increasing estrangement from the General, which would
rapidly accelerate into complete alienation by 1927.

Not least, Hitler promised Held — an easy promise to make in the
circumstances — that he would not again attempt a putsch. Held told
Hitler in the most forthright terms that times had changed. He
would not tolerate any return to the sort of circumstances that had
prevailed before the putsch. Nor would the constitutional
government treat the revolutionaries of yesterday’ as an equal
partner. But Hitler got what he wanted. With Gtrtner’s backing, the
way was now paved for the removal of the ban on the NSDAP and
the Volkischer Beobachter on 16 February. By that time, Hitler’s
relations with his rivals in the NSFB had been clarified.

By mid-February, events were moving in Hitler’s way. On 12
February, Ludendorff dissolved the Reich Leadership of the NSFB.
Shortly afterwards, just before the lifting of the ban on the party,
Hitler announced his decision to re-found the NSDAP. A flood of
declarations of loyalty now poured in.

On 26 February, the Volkischer Beobachter appeared for the first
time since the putsch. Hitler’s leading article ‘On the Renewal of
Our Movement’ placed the emphasis on avoiding recriminations for
the divisions in the volkisch movement and, learning from past
mistakes, on looking towards the future. There was to be no place
in the movement for religious disputes — a necessary disclaimer in
mainly Catholic Bavaria, and a criticism of the volkisch movement
which had accused Hitler of making concessions to Catholicism. He
refused to accept any external conditions limiting his own
leadership, proclaimed the aims of the movement as unchanged, and
demanded internal unity. His ‘Call to Former Members’ in the same
edition struck the same tone. Where party members rejoined, said
Hitler, he would not ask about the past, and would concern himself
only that past disunity should not repeat itself. He demanded unity,
loyalty, and obedience. He made no concessions. What was on offer
was a ‘pax Hitleriana’. The newspaper also carried the new
regulations for the reformed NSDAP, based on the statutes of July
1921. Leadership and unity were once more the keynotes. All splits

were to be avoided in the struggle against ‘the most terrible enemy
of the German people ... Jewry and Marxism’. The SA was to return
to the role of party support troop and training ground for young
activists that it had occupied before becoming incorporated in the
Bavarian paramilitary scene in February 1923. (This was to prove,
within weeks, the breaking-point with Ernst Rohm, who, unable to
persuade Hitler to agree to retaining the SA as a conventional
paramilitary organization, withdrew from political life and departed
for Bolivia.) Entry into the refounded party could only come about
by taking out new membership. There could be no renewal or
continuation of former membership. This both had symbolic value,
and also accorded with the stipulation of centralized control of
membership from Munich. Retention of his Munich power-base was
vital to Hitler. When Ltidecke suggested moving the headquarters to
Thuringia — strategically well situated in central Germany,
associated with Luther and the cultural traditions of Weimar, in a
Protestant area which did not have to reckon with the opposition of
the Catholic establishment, as in Bavaria, and, not least, a region
with an existing strong base of volkisch sympathizers — Hitler
conceded that there was something to be said for the idea. ‘But I
can’t leave Munich,’ he immediately added. ‘I’m at home here; I
mean something here; there are many here who are devoted to me,
to me alone, and to nobody else. That’s important.’

At eight o’clock on the evening of 27 February 1925, Hitler, with
his usual sense of theatre, made his re-entry to the Munich political
scene where he had left it sixteen months earlier: at the
Burgerbraukeller. Just as before the putsch, red placards advertising
the speech had been plastered around Munich for days. People
began to take up their seats in the early afternoon. Three hours
before the scheduled start, the huge beerhall was packed. Over
3,000 were jammed inside, 2,000 more turned away, and police
cordons set up to block off the surrounding area. Some prominent
faces were missing. Rosenberg was one. He was irritated at being
excluded from Hitler’s inner circle in the weeks since his return
from Landsberg. He told Ltidecke: ‘I won’t take part in that comedy

... | know the sort of brother-kissing Hitler intends to call for.’
Ludendorff, Strasser, and Rohm were also absent. Hitler wanted the
first party-leader, Drexler, to chair the meeting. But Drexler insisted
that Hermann Esser be evicted from the party. Hitler would accept
no conditions. And for him, Esser had ‘more political sense in his
fingertips than the whole bunch of his accusers in their buttocks’. So
one of Hitler’s most trusted Munich followers, his business-manager
Max Amann, opened the meeting.

Hitler spoke for almost two hours. The first three-quarters of his
speech offered his standard account of Germany’s plight since 1918,
the Jews as the cause of it, the weakness of bourgeois parties, and
the aims of Marxism (which, he stated, could only be combated by a
doctrine of higher truth but ‘similar brutality of execution’). Hitler
was frank about the need to focus all energy on one goal, on
attacking a single enemy to avoid fragmentation and disunity. “The
art of all great popular leaders,’ he proclaimed, ‘consisted at all
times in concentrating the attention of the masses on a single
enemy.’ From the context, it was plain that he meant the Jews.
Only in the last quarter of the speech did Hitler arrive at his real
theme of the evening. No one should expect him, he said, to take
sides in the bitter dispute still raging in the volkisch movement. He
saw in each party comrade only the supporter of the common idea,
he declared, to lasting applause. His task as leader was not to
explore what had happened in the past, but to bring together those
pulling apart. At last he came to the climacteric. The dispute was at
an end. Those prepared to join should sink their differences. For
nine months, others had had time to ‘look after’ the interests of the
party, he pointed out with sarcasm. To great and lasting applause,
he added: ‘Gentlemen, let the representation of the interests of the
movement from now on be my concern!’ His leadership had,
however, to be accepted unconditionally. ‘I am not prepared to
allow conditions as long as I carry personally the responsibility,’ he
concluded. ‘And I now carry again the complete responsibility for
everything that takes place in this movement.’ After a year, he
would hold himself to account. There were tumultuous cheers and

cries of ‘Heil’. Everyone stood for the singing of ‘Deutschland,
Deutschland tiber alles’.

Then came the finale. It was a piece of pure theatre. But it had
symbolic meaning, not lost on those present. Arch-enemies over the
past year and more — Hermann Esser, Julius Streicher, Artur Dinter
from the GVG, Rudolf Buttmann, Gottfried Feder, Wilhelm Frick
from the ‘parliamentary’ Volkischer Block — mounted the platform
and, among emotional scenes, with many standing on chairs and
tables and the crowd pressing forward from the back of the hall,
shook hands, forgave each other, and swore undying loyalty to the
leader. It was like medieval vassals swearing fealty to their
overlord. Others followed. Whatever the hypocrisy, the public show
of unity, it was plain, could only have been attained under Hitler as
leader. He could with some justice claim to have restored the
‘homogeneity’ of the party. In the following years, it would become
more and more apparent: Hitler, and the ‘idea’ increasingly
embodied in his leadership, constituted the sole, indispensable force
of integration in a movement that retained the potential to tear
itself apart. Hitler’s position as supreme leader standing over the
party owed much to the recognition of this fact.

Outside loyalist circles, the immediate response to Hitler’s speech
on the volkisch Right was often one of disappointment. This was
mainly because of the way Hitler was plainly distancing himself
from Ludendorff, still seen by many as the leader of the volkisch
movement. Ludendorff s standing remained a potential problem. But
as so often, luck came to Hitler’s aid.

On 28 February 1925, the day after the refoundation of the
NSDAP, the first Reich President of the Weimar Republic, the Social
Democrat Friedrich Ebert, still vilified by the Right, died at the age
of fifty-four from the effects of an appendicitis operation. Against
the arguments of some of his advisers, Hitler insisted on putting
forward Ludendorff as the National Socialist candidate, and
persuaded the General to stand. He regarded the General as no
more than a token candidate, without a chance of winning. Why
Ludendorff agreed to stand is less easy to understand than why

Hitler wanted the candidacy of a rival of whom he was by now in
private extremely scathing. It seems that Hitler persuaded the
General that the conservative candidate of the Right, Karl Jarres,
had to be stopped, and, flattering Ludendorff ’s prestige, inveigled
him into standing. Probably Ludendorff reckoned with the backing
of his volkisch friends. But when they decided — in order not to split
the right-wing vote — to put their support behind Jarres, the
General’s fate was sealed. What had seemed to some in Hitler’s
entourage a risky strategy was, in fact, no great risk at all, and was
more or less guaranteed to damage Ludendorff. That this was the
intention was scarcely concealed, even by some leading Nazis.

For Ludendorff, the election on 29 March was a catastrophe. He
polled only 286,000 votes, 1.1 per cent of the votes cast. This was
600,000 fewer than the volkisch Right had gained at the Reichstag
election in December 1924, itself a disastrous result. Hitler was
anything but distressed at the outcome. ‘That’s all right,’ he told
Hermann Esser, ‘now we’ve finally finished him.’ The election
winner in the run-off on 26 April was another war-hero, Field-
Marshal Hindenburg. Weimar democracy was now in the hands of
one of the pillars of the old order. Ludendorff never recovered from
his defeat. Hitler’s great rival for the leadership of the volkisch Right
no longer posed a challenge. He was rapidly on his way into the
political wilderness. By 1927, Hitler was openly attacking his
former ally — and accusing him of freemasonry (an accusation which
was never countered).

The volkisch movement itself, in 1924 numerically stronger and
geographically more widespread than the NSDAP and its successor
organizations, was not only weakened and divided, but had now
effectively lost its figurehead. At first, especially in southern
Germany, there were difficulties where local party leaders refused
to accede to Hitler’s demand that they break their ties with volkisch
associations and subordinate themselves totally to his leadership.
But increasingly they went over to Hitler. Most realized the way the
wind was blowing. Without Hitler, they had no future. For his part,
Hitler was particularly assiduous during the coming months in

visiting local party branches in Bavaria. The ban on speaking at
public meetings which the Bavarian authorities had imposed on him
on 9 March (followed in subsequent months by a similar ban in
most other states, including Prussia) gave him more time for
speaking in closed party meetings. The handshake with individual
members, invariably a part of such meetings, symbolically
cemented the bonds between himself and the local membership. A
sturdy platform of support for Hitler’s leadership was thus laid in
Bavaria. In the north, the path was less even.

On 11 March, two days after the speaking ban had been imposed,
Hitler commissioned Gregor Strasser to organize the party in north
Germany. Strasser, a Landshut apothecary, a big, bluff Bavarian, in
the pre-putsch days SA chief in Lower Bavaria, a diabetic who mixed
it with the roughest in beerhall brawls but relaxed by reading
Homer in the original, was probably the most able of the leading
Nazis. Above all he was a superb organizer. It was largely Gregor
Strasser’s work, building on the contacts he had established while in
the Reich Leadership of the NSFB, that resulted in the rapid
construction of the NSDAP’s organization in north Germany. Most of
the local branches in the north had to be created from scratch. By
the end of 1925, these branches numbered 262, compared with only
seventy-one on the eve of the putsch. While Hitler spent much of
the summer of 1925 in the mountains near Berchtesgaden, working
on the second volume of his book, and taking time out to enjoy the
Bayreuth Festival, bothering little about the party outside Bavaria,
Strasser was unceasing in his efforts in the north. His own views on
a ‘national socialism’ had been formed in the trenches. He was more
idealistic, less purely instrumentalist, than Hitler in his aim to win
over the working class. And, though of course strongly antisemitic,
he thought little of the obsessive, near-exclusive emphasis on Jew-
baiting that characterized Hitler and his entourage in the Munich
party. In fact, dating from the period of the rancorous split in 1924,

he could barely tolerate the leading lights in the Bavarian NSDAP,
Esser and Streicher. Even if he expressed them somewhat
differently, however, he shared Hitler’s basic aims. And though he
never succumbed to Hitler-worship, he recognized Hitler’s
indispensability to the movement, and remained a Hitler loyalist.

Strasser’s views, and his approach, fitted well into the way the
party had developed in north Germany, far away from the Bavarian
heartlands. A central issue there was the intense detestation,
deriving from the deep clashes of the ‘leaderless time’ of 1924, of
the three individuals they saw as dominating affairs in Bavaria —
Esser, Streicher, and Amann. The rejection of these figures was to
remain a point of tension between the north German NSDAP and the
Munich headquarters throughout 1925. This went hand in hand with
the refusal to be dictated to by the Munich headquarters, where the
party secretary, Philipp Bouhler, was attempting to impose
centralized control over party membership, and with it Munich’s
complete authority over the whole movement. A further integrally
related factor was the concern over Hitler’s continuing inaction
while the crisis in the NSDAP deepened. It was his passivity, in the
eyes of the northern party leaders, that allowed the Esser clique its
dominance and kept him far too much under the unsavoury
influence of the former GVG leaders. His support for them remained
a source of intense disappointment and bitterness. Hitler had also
disappointed in his neglect of the north, despite his promises, since
the refoundation. Beyond this, there were continuing disagreements
about electoral participation. The Gottingen party leadership,
especially, remained wholly hostile to parliamentary tactics, which,
it felt, would result in the ‘movement’ being turned into a mere
‘party’, like others. Not least, there were different accents on policy
and different emphases on the National Socialist ‘idea’. Some of the
north German leaders, like Strasser, advocated a more ‘socialist’
emphasis. This aimed at maximum appeal to workers in the big
industrial regions. The different social structure demanded a
different type of appeal than that favoured in Bavaria.

But it was not just a matter of cynical propaganda. Some of the
leading activists in the north, like the young Joseph Goebbels in the
Elberfeld area, close to the Ruhr, were attracted by the ideas of
‘national Bolshevism’. Possessed of a sharp mind and biting wit, the
future Propaganda Minister, among the most intelligent of the
leading figures in the Nazi Movement, had joined the NSDAP at the
end of 1924. Brought up in a Catholic family of moderate means,
from Rheyd, a small industrial town in the Rhineland, his deformed
right foot exposed him from childhood days to jibes, taunts, and
lasting feelings of physical inadequacy. That his early pretensions as
a writer met with little recognition further fostered his resentment.
‘Why does fate deny to me what it gives to others?’ he asked
himself in an entry in March 1925 in the diary he would keep till
nearly the end of his days in the Berlin bunker twenty years later,
adding, self-pityingly, Jesus’s words on the Cross — ‘My God, my
God, why hast Thou forsaken me?’ His inferiority complex produced
driving ambition and the need to demonstrate achievement through
mental agility in a movement which derided both physical weakness
and ‘intellectuals’. Not least, it produced ideological fanaticism.

Goebbels and some other northern leaders thought of themselves
as revolutionaries, with more in common with the Communists than
with the hated bourgeoisie. There were some sympathies for Russia.
And there was talk of a party trade union. Finally, there was the
attitude towards Hitler and towards the party’s programme. All the
north German leaders accepted Hitler’s position, and his right to
head the party. They recognized him as the ‘hero of Munich’ for his
part in the putsch, and for his stance at the trial. His standing and
reputation needed no emphasis. But many of the north German
party faithful did not know Hitler personally, had not even met
him. Their relationship to him was, therefore, quite different from
that of Bavarian party members, especially those in Munich. Hitler
was their leader; that was not in question. But Hitler, too, in their
eyes, was bound to the ‘idea’. Moreover, the 1920 Programme that
outlined the ‘idea’ in terms of the aims of the party was itself in
their view deficient and in need of reform.

By late summer 1925, the northern leaders, differing among
themselves in matters of interpretation and emphasis on points of
the programme, aims, and meaning of National Socialism, were at
least agreed that the party was undergoing a crisis. This was
reflected in declining membership and stagnation. It was associated
by them, above all, with the state of the party in Munich. But all
that could be achieved was the establishment, under Strasser’s
leadership, of a ‘Working Community of the North- and West-
German Gaue of the NSDAP’, a loose organization of northern party
districts, mainly for arranging the exchange of speakers.

This was not in any way intended as a challenge to Hitler. Even
so, it did come to pose a threat to his authority. The clashes over
the Esser clique, and over electoral participation, were not in
themselves critical. Of far greater significance was the fact that
Gregor Strasser and Goebbels, especially, looked to the Community
as an opportunity to reshape the party’s programme. Ultimately,
Strasser hoped to replace the Programme of 1920. In November, he
took the first steps in composing the Community’s own draft
programme. It advocated a racially integrated German nation at the
heart of a central European customs union, the basis of a united
states of Europe. Internally, it proposed a corporate state. In the
economy, it looked to tying peasants to their landholdings, and
public control of the means of production while protecting private
property.

Not only was the draft vague, incoherent, and contradictory. It
could only be divisive. Hitler plainly recognized the danger signals.
He summoned about sixty party leaders to a meeting on 14
February 1926 at Bamberg, in Upper Franconia. There was no
agenda. Hitler, it was stated, simply wanted to discuss some
‘important questions’.

He spoke for two hours. He addressed in the main the issue of
foreign policy and future alliances. His position was wholly opposed
to that of the Working Community. Alliances were never ideal, he
said, but always ‘purely a matter of political business’. Britain and
Italy, both distancing themselves from Germany’s arch-enemy

France, offered the best potential. Any thought of an alliance with
Russia could be ruled out. It would mean ‘the immediate political
bolshevization of Germany’, and with it ‘national suicide’.
Germany’s future could be secured solely by acquiring land, by
eastern colonization as in the Middle Ages, by a colonial policy not
overseas but in Europe. On the question of the expropriation of
German princes without compensation (a proposal by the Left, but
supported by north German Nazi leaders), Hitler again ruled out the
position of the Working Community. ‘For us there are today no
princes, only Germans,’ he declared. ‘We stand on the basis of the
law, and will not give a Jewish system of exploitation a legal
pretext for the complete plundering of our people.’ Such a rhetorical
slant could not conceal the outright rejection of the views of the
northern leaders. Finally, Hitler repeated his insistence that
religious problems had no part to play in the National Socialist
Movement.

Goebbels was appalled. ‘I feel devastated. What sort of Hitler? A
reactionary? Amazingly clumsy and uncertain ... Probably one of
the greatest disappointments of my life. I no longer believe fully in
Hitler. That’s the terrible thing: my inner support has been taken
away.’

Hitler had reasserted his authority. The potential threat from the
Working Community had evaporated. Despite some initial signs of
defiance, the fate of the Community had been sealed at Bamberg.
Gregor Strasser promised Hitler to collect all copies of the draft
programme he had distributed, and wrote to members of the
Community on 5 March asking for them to be returned. The
Community now petered out into non-existence. On 1 July 1926,
Hitler signed a directive stating that ‘since the NSDAP represents a
large working community, there is no justification for smaller
working communities as a combination of individual Gaue’. By that
time, Strasser’s Working Community of northern and western
Gauleiter was finished. With it went the last obstacle to the
complete establishment of Hitler’s supreme mastery over the party.

Hitler was shrewd enough to be generous after his Bamberg
triumph. By September, Strasser himself had been called to the
Reich Leadership as Propaganda Leader of the party, while Franz
Pfeffer von Salomon (Gauleiter of Westphalia, a former army officer
who had subsequently joined the Freikorps, participated in the Kapp
Putsch, and been active in opposition to the French in the Ruhr) was
appointed head of the SA. Most important of all, the impressionable
Goebbels was openly courted by Hitler and completely won over.

To bring about what has often been called Goebbels’s ‘Damascus’
in fact took little doing. Goebbels had idolized Hitler from the
beginning. ‘Who is this man? Half plebian, half God! Actually
Christ, or only John [the Baptist]?’ he had written in his diary in
October 1925 on finishing reading the first volume of Mein Kampf.
‘This man has everything to be a king. The born tribune of the
people. The coming dictator,’ he added a few weeks later. ‘How I
love him.’ Like others in the Working Community, he had wanted
only to liberate Hitler from the clutches of the Esser clique.
Bamberg was a bitter blow. But his belief in Hitler was dented, not
destroyed. It needed only a sign from Hitler to restore it. And the
sign was not long in coming.

In mid-March Goebbels made his peace with Streicher after a long
talk in Nuremberg. At the end of the month he received a letter
from Hitler inviting him to speak in Munich on 8 April. Hitler’s car
was there to meet him at the station to take him to his hotel. ‘What
a noble reception,’ noted Goebbels in his diary. Hitler’s car was
again provided the next day to take Goebbels to visit Lake
Starnberg, a few miles outside Munich. In the evening, after
Goebbels’s speech in the Biirgerbraukeller, in which he evidently
retreated from his more radical version of socialism, Hitler
embraced him, tears in his eyes. Next afternoon Hitler spent three
hours going over the same ground he had covered at Bamberg.
Then, Goebbels had been sorely disappointed. Now, he thought it
was ‘brilliant’. ‘I love him ... He has thought through everything,’
Goebbels continued. ‘He’s a man, taking it all round. Such a
sparkling mind can be my leader. I bow to the greater one, the

political genius.’ Goebbels’s conversion was complete. A few days
later, he met Hitler again, this time in Stuttgart. ‘I believe he has
taken me to his heart like no one else,’ he wrote. ‘Adolf Hitler, I
love you because you are both great and simple at the same time.
What one calls a genius.’ Towards the end of the year, Hitler
appointed Goebbels as Gauleiter of Berlin —- a key position if the
party were to advance in the capital. Goebbels was Hitler’s man. He
would remain so, adoring and subservient alike to the man he said
he loved ‘like a father’, down to the last days in the bunker.

The Bamberg meeting had been a milestone in the development
of the NSDAP. The Working Community had neither wanted nor
attempted a rebellion against Hitler’s leadership. But once Strasser
had composed his draft programme, a clash was inevitable. Was the
party to be subordinated to a programme, or to its leader? The
Bamberg meeting decided what National Socialism was to mean. It
was not to mean a party torn, as the volkisch movement had been in
1924, over points of dogma. The Twenty-Five-Point Programme of
1920 was therefore regarded as sufficient. ‘It stays as it is,’ Hitler
was reported as saying. ‘The New Testament is also full of
contradictions, but that hasn’t prevented the spread of Christianity.’
Its symbolic significance, not any practical feasibility was what
mattered. Any more precise policy statement would not merely
have produced continuing inner dissension. It would have bound
Hitler himself to the programme, subordinated him to abstract
tenets of doctrine that were open to dispute and alteration. As it
was, his position as Leader over the movement was now inviolable.

At Bamberg, too, an important ideological issue — the anti-Russian
thrust of foreign policy — had been reaffirmed. The alternative
approach of the northern group had been rejected. The ‘idea’ and
the Leader were coming to be inseparable. But the ‘idea’ amounted
to a set of distant goals, a mission for the future. The only way to it
was through the attainment of power. For that, maximum flexibility
was needed. No ideological or organizational disputes should in
future be allowed to divert from the path. Fanatical willpower,
converted into organized mass force, was what was required. That

demanded freedom of action for the Leader; and total obedience
from the following. What emerged in the aftermath of Bamberg
was, therefore, the growth of a new type of political organization:
one subjected to the will of the Leader, who stood over and above
the party, the embodiment in his own person of the ‘idea’ of
National Socialism.

By the time of the General Members’ Meeting on 22 May,
attended by 657 party members, Hitler’s leadership had emerged
inordinately strengthened. He frankly admitted that he attributed
no value to the meeting, which had been called simply to meet the
legal requirements of a public association. The forthcoming Party
Rally in Weimar — the opportunity for a visual display of the new-
found unity — was what counted in his eyes. Following his ‘report’
on the party’s activities since its refoundation, Hitler was
unanimously ‘re-elected’ as party chairman. The party
administration remained in the hands of those close to him. A few
amendments were made to the party statutes. Altered five times
since 1920, these were now couched in their finalized form. They
assured Hitler of the control of the party machine. The appointment
of his most important subordinates, the Gauleiter, was in his hands.
In effect, the statutes reflected the leader party which the NSDAP
had become. In the light of the conflict with the Working
Community over a new programme, not least significant was the
reaffirmation of the Twenty-Five Points of 24 February 1920. ‘This
Programme is immutable,’ the statutes unambiguously declared.

A few weeks later, the Party Rally held at Weimar — where Hitler
was permitted to speak in public — on 3-4 July 1926 provided the
intended show of unity behind the leader. An estimated 7-8,000,
including 3,600 stormtroopers and 116 SS men, attended. It was the
first time that the Schutzstaffel (SS, Protection Squad), founded in
April 1925 and arising initially out of Hitler’s personal bodyguard,
the Sto&trupp Adolf Hitler (Adolf Hitler Assault Squad), had been
on public display. Also on display for the first time, and handed to
the SS as a sign of Hitler’s approbation of his new élite organization,
was the ‘Blood Flag’ of 1923, which had led the procession to the

Feldherrnhalle. Every stormtrooper present swore a personal oath
of loyalty to Hitler. The party leader received a rapturous reception
from delegates after his speech. ‘Deep and mystical. Almost like a
gospel ... I thank fate, that it gave us this man,’ wrote Goebbels.

The Nazi Party was still far smaller than it had been at the time
of the putsch. In the overall framework of national politics, it was
wholly insignificant. To outside observers, its prospects seemed
bleak. But internally, the crisis period was over. Though small, the
party was better organized as well as geographically more
widespread than the pre-putsch party had been. Its image of unity
and strength was beginning to persuade other volkisch organizations
to throw in their lot with the NSDAP. Above all, it was turning into
a new type of political organization — a leader party. Hitler had
established the basis of his mastery over the movement. In the next
years, while still in the political wilderness, that mastery would
become complete.

Ill

Few people saw Hitler on a regular basis in these years. Only his
substitute family — the trusted and devotedly loyal group of Munich
cronies who formed his coterie of bodyguards, chauffeurs, and
secretaries — were in constant touch with him. Some, like Julius
Schaub (his general factotum) and Rudolf Hefs (his secretary), had
served in Landsberg with Hitler for their part in the putsch. This
‘houseguard’ escorted him, protected him, shielded him from the
increasing numbers wanting an audience. Getting to see Hitler was
difficult. Those running party business in Munich often had to wait
for days before they could sort out some matter with him. For
leading figures in the movement, too, he could proved inaccessible
for weeks at a time. Even on public occasions he was largely
unapproachable. Before a speech, he would remain closeted in his
room. Only once the hall was reported as full would he set out.
Afterwards, when away from Munich, he would immediately return
to his hotel. Journalists might be permitted to see him for a few

minutes, if an interview had been prearranged. But scarcely anyone
else was allowed an audience.

Hitler’s pronounced sense of ‘mission’, his heroic self-image of
‘greatness’, the necessity of upholding the aura increasingly
attached to him by his supporters, and the Olympian detachment
from the intrigues and in-fighting of his subordinates demanded a
high degree of isolation. Beyond this, the distance he deliberately
placed between himself and even high-ranking members of his
movement was calculated to emphasize the sense of awe and
admiration in those admitted to his presence, or encountering him
at a theatrically staged mass-meeting or rally. At the same time, it
enhanced the enigmatic in him. Even those who knew him found it
hard to dissect and understand his personality. Hitler was happy to
encourage the sense of mystery and fascination.

He was above all a consummate actor. This certainly applied to
the stage-managed occasions — the delayed entry to the packed hall,
the careful construction of his speeches, the choice of colourful
phrases, the gestures and body-language. Here, his natural
rhetorical talent was harnessed to well-honed performing skills. A
pause at the beginning to allow the tension to mount; a low-key,
even hesitant, start; undulations and variations of diction, not
melodious certainly, but vivid and highly expressive; almost
staccato bursts of sentences, followed by well-timed rallentando to
expose the emphasis of a key point; theatrical use of the hands as
the speech rose in crescendo; sarcastic wit aimed at opponents: all
were devices carefully nurtured to maximize effect. As in the
meticulous attention to detail in the preparations for the party
rallies at Weimar in 1926 and Nuremberg in 1927 and 1929, Hitler
was preoccupied with impact and impression. His clothing was also
selected to match the occasion: the light-brown uniform with
swastika armband, belt, attached diagonal strap crossing over the
right shoulder, and knee-high leather boots when among the faithful
at big party meetings and rallies; dark suit, white shirt, and tie,
when appropriate to conveying a less martial, more ‘respectable’,
appearance to a wider audience.

But the acting was not confined to such occasions. Those who
came into contact with Hitler, while retaining a critical distance
from him, were convinced that he was acting much of the time. He
could play the parts as required. ‘He was a kindly conversationalist,
kissing the hands of ladies, a friendly uncle giving chocolates to
children, a simple man of the people shaking the calloused hands of
peasants and workers,’ one of his associates later recalled. He could
be the model of friendliness in public to someone he was privately
castigating and deriding. The play-acting and hypocrisy did not
mean that he was solely a cynical manipulator, that he did not
believe in the central tenets of his ‘world-view’. This fervent belief,
coupled with the strength of his domineering personality, carried
conviction among those drawn to his message.

The irresistible fascination that many — not a few of them
cultured, educated, and intelligent — found in his extraordinary
personality-traits doubtless owed much to his ability to play parts.
As many attested, he could be charming — particularly to women —
and was often witty and amusing. Much of the time it was show,
put on for effect. The same could be true of his rages and outbursts
of apparently uncontrollable anger, which were in reality often
contrived. The firm handshake and ‘manly’ eye-to-eye contact which
Hitler cultivated on occasions when he had to meet ordinary party
members was, for the awestruck lowly activist, a moment never to
be forgotten. For Hitler, it was merely acting; it meant no more
than the reinforcement of the personality cult, the cement of the
movement, the bonding force between Leader and followers. In
reality, Hitler showed remarkably little human interest in his
followers. His egocentrism was of monumental proportions. The
propaganda image of ‘fatherliness’ concealed inner emptiness. Other
individuals were of interest to him only in so far as they were
useful.

Hitler’s ‘coffee-house tirades, his restlessness, his resentments
against possible rivals in the party leadership, his distaste for
systematic work, his paranoid outbursts of hatred’ were seen by
Putzi Hanfstaengl as a sign of sexual deficiency. This was no more

than guesswork. But Hitler’s relations with women were indeed odd
in some ways. Why this was so can only be surmised. Yet here, too,
he was often acting out a role. On one occasion, he took advantage
of Putzi Hanfstaengl’s brief absence from the room to fall on his
knees in front of Helene Hanfstaengl, describing himself as her
slave and bemoaning the fate that had led him to her too late. When
Helene told him of the incident, Putzi put it down to Hitler’s need
to play the role of the languishing troubadour from time to time.

In physical appearance, Hitler was little changed from the time
before the putsch. Away from the speaker’s podium he looked
anything but impressive. His face had hardened. But, as he told
Hanfstaengl would be the case, he soon lost the weight he had put
on in Landsberg once he started speaking again. Hitler reckoned he
lost up to five pounds in weight through perspiration during a big
speech. To counter this, his aides insisted on twenty bottles of
mineral water being provided at the side of the lectern. His dress
sense was anything but stylish. He still often favoured his plain blue
suit. His trilby, light-coloured raincoat, leather leggings, and riding-
whip gave him - especially when arriving with his bodyguards in
the big black six-seater Mercedes convertible he had bought in early
1925 — the appearance of an eccentric gangster. For relaxation, he
preferred to wear traditional Bavarian lederhosen. But even when
he was in prison, he hated to be seen without a tie. During the heat
of the summer, he would never be seen in a bathing costume.
Whereas Mussolini revelled in virile images of himself as a
sportsman or athlete, Hitler had a deep aversion to being seen other
than fully clothed. More than petty-bourgeois proprieties, or
prudishness, image was the vital consideration. Anything potentially
embarrassing or inviting ridicule was to be avoided at all costs.

As they had done before the putsch, the Bruckmanns helped him
to establish useful contacts in ‘better’ social circles. He had to adjust
to a different type of audience from that in the beerhalls - more
critical, less amenable to crude sloganizing and emotion. But in
essence, little or nothing had changed. Hitler was at ease only when
dominating the conversation. His monologues were a cover for his

half-baked knowledge. There was no doubting that he had a quick
mind and a biting and destructive wit. He formed instant — often
damning — judgements on individuals. And the combination of a
domineering presence, resort to factual detail (often distorted), for
which he had an exceptional memory, and utter conviction
(brooking no alternative argument) based on ideological certitude
was impressive to those already half-persuaded of his extraordinary
qualities. But those with knowledge and critical distance could often
quickly see behind his crude arguments. His arrogance was
breathtaking. ‘What could I learn that’s new?’ he asked Hanfstaengl,
on being encouraged to learn a foreign language and travel abroad.
Shortly after the Weimar Party Rally, in mid-July 1926, Hitler
left Munich with his entourage for a holiday on the Obersalzberg.
He stayed in a secluded and beautiful spot situated high in the
mountains on the Austrian border above Berchtesgaden, flanked by
the Untersberg (where legend had it that the medieval emperor,
Frederick Barbarossa, lay sleeping), the Kneifelspitze, and the
highest of them, the Watzmann. The scenery was breathtaking. Its
monumental grandeur had first captivated Hitler when, under the
pseudonym of ‘Herr Wolf ’, he had visited Dietrich Eckart there in
the winter of 1922-3. The Biichners, owners of the Pension Moritz
where he stayed, were early supporters of the Movement. He liked
them, and could enjoy in this mountain retreat a level of seclusion
which he could never expect in Munich. He had, he later recalled,
gone there in 1925 when he needed peace and quiet to dictate parts
of the second volume of Mein Kampf. Whenever he could in the next
two years, he returned to the Obersalzberg. Then he learnt that an
alpine house there, Haus Wachenfeld, belonging to the widow of a
north German businessman, was available to let. The widow, whose
maiden name had been Wachenfeld, was a party member. He was
offered a favourable price of 100 Marks a month. Soon, he was in a
position to buy it. That the widow was in financial difficulties at the
time helped. Hitler had his summer retreat. He could look down
from his ‘magic mountain’ and see himself bestriding the world. In
the Third Reich, at enormous cost to the state, Haus Wachenfeld

would be turned into the massive complex known as the Berghof, a
palace befitting a modern dictator, and a second seat of government
for those ministers who each year had to set up residence nearby if
they had a hope of contacting the head of state and expediting
government business. Before that, on renting Haus Wachenfeld back
in 1928, Hitler had — rather surprisingly since they had never been
close — telephoned his half-sister Angela Raubal in Vienna and asked
her to keep house for him. She agreed, and soon brought her
daughter, a lively and attractive twenty-year-old, also named
Angela, though known to all as Geli, to stay with her. Three years
later, Geli was to be found dead in Hitler’s flat in Munich.

While dictating the last chapters of Mein Kampf during his stay on
the Obersalzberg in summer 1926, Hitler had, as we saw,
consolidated his thinking on foreign policy, especially the
acquisition of territory in the east. This idea, especially, was to
dominate his speeches and writings of the mid-1920s. However, he
was skilful in tailoring his speeches to his audience, as he showed in
an important speech he delivered a few months earlier. Hopes of
gaining financial support and of winning influential backing for his
party had made him keen to accept the invitation of the prestigious
Hamburger Nationalklub to address its members in the elegant
Hotel Atlantic on 28 February 1926. It was not his usual audience.
Here, he faced a socially exclusive club whose 400-450 members
were drawn from Hamburg’s upper bourgeoisie — many of them
high-ranking officers, civil servants, lawyers, and businessmen. His
tone was different from that he used in the Munich beerhalls. In his
two-hour speech, he made not a single mention of the Jews. He was
well aware that the primitive antisemitic rantings that roused the
masses in the Zircus Krone would be counter-productive in this
audience. Instead, the emphasis was placed entirely on the need to
eliminate Marxism as the prerequisite of Germany’s recovery. By
‘Marxism’, Hitler did not merely mean the German Communist
Party, which had attained only 9 per cent of the vote at the last
Reichstag election, in December 1924. Beyond the KPD, the term
served to invoke the bogy of Soviet Communism, brought into

power by a Revolution less than a decade earlier, and followed by a
civil war whose atrocities had been emblazoned across a myriad of
right-wing publications. ‘Marxism’ had even wider application.
Hitler was also subsuming under this rubric all brands of socialism
other than the ‘national’ variety he preached, and using it in
particular to attack the SPD and trade unionism. In fact, to the
chagrin of some of its followers, the SPD — still Germany’s largest
political party — had moved in practice far from its theoretical
Marxist roots, and was wedded to upholding the liberal democracy
it had been instrumental in calling into being in 1918-19. No
‘Marxist’ apocalypse threatened from that quarter. But Hitler’s
rhetoric had, of course, long branded those responsible for the
Revolution and the Republic which followed it ‘the November
Criminals’. ‘Marxism’ was, therefore, also convenient shorthand to
denigrate Weimar democracy. And to his well-heeled bourgeois
audience in Hamburg, anti-Marxist to the core, his verbal assault on
the Left was music to the ears.

Hitler reduced it to a simple formula: if the Marxist ‘world-view’
was not ‘eradicated’, Germany would never rise again. The task of
the National Socialist Movement was straightforward: ‘the smashing
and annihilation of the Marxist Weltanschauung’. Terror must be met
with terror. The bourgeoisie itself was incapable of defeating the
threat of Bolshevism. It needed a mass movement as intolerant as
that of the Marxists themselves to do it. Winning the masses rested
on two premisses. The first was to recognize their social concerns.
But in case his audience thought this was back-door Marxism, Hitler
was quick to reassure them: social legislation demanded ‘the
promotion of the welfare of the individual in a framework that
guaranteed retention of an independent economy’. ‘We are all
workers,’ he stated. ‘The aim is not to get higher and higher wages,
but to increase production, because that is to the advantage of each
individual.’ His audience was unlikely to disagree with such
sentiments. The second premiss was to offer the masses ‘a
programme that is unalterable, a political faith that is unshakeable’.
The usual party programmes, manifestos, and philosophies of

bourgeois parties would not win them over. Hitler’s contempt for
the masses was plain. ‘The broad mass is feminine,’ he stated, ‘one-
sided in its attitude; it knows only the hard “either-or”.’ It wanted
only a single viewpoint upheld — but then with all available means,
and, he added, now mixing his genders and pointing to what is
normally taken to be a more masculine characteristic, ‘does not
shrink from using force’. What the mass had to feel was its own
strength. Among a crowd of 200,000 in Berlin’s Lustgarten, the
individual felt no more than ‘a small worm’, subject to mass-
suggestion, aware only of those around him being prepared to fight
for an ideal. ‘The broad masses are blind and stupid and don’t know
what they are doing,’ he claimed. They were ‘primitive in attitude’.
For them, ‘understanding’ offered only a ‘shaky platform’. ‘What is
stable is emotion: hatred.’ The more Hitler preached intolerance,
force, and hatred, as the solution to Germany’s problems, the more
his audience liked it. He was interrupted on numerous occasions
during these passages with cheers and shouts of ‘bravo’. At the end
there was a lengthy ovation, and cries of ‘Heil’.

National revival through terroristic anti-Marxism built on the
cynical manipulation and indoctrination of the masses: that was the
sum total of Hitler’s message to the upper-crust of the Hamburg
bourgeoisie. Nationalism and anti-Marxism were scarcely
peculiarities of the Nazis alone. Nor did they amount in themselves
to much of an ideology. What distinguished Hitler’s approach to his
Hamburg audience was not the ideas themselves, but the impression
of fanatical will, utter ruthlessness, and the creation of a nationalist
movement resting on the support of the masses. And it was plain
from the enthusiastic response that selective terror deployed against
‘Marxists’ would meet with little or no opposition from the élite of
Germany’s most liberal city.

Back among his ‘own sort’, little or nothing had changed. The
tone was very different from that adopted in Hamburg. In closed
party meetings or, after the speaking ban had been lifted in early
1927, once more in Munich beerhalls and the Circus Krone, the
attacks on the Jews were as vicious and unconstrained as ever. In

speech after speech, as before the putsch, he launched brutal
assaults against the Jews, bizarrely depicted both as the wire-pullers
of finance capital and as poisoning the people with subversive
Marxist doctrine. Explicit attacks on the Jews occurred more
frequently and extensively in 1925 and 1926 than in the subsequent
two years. Antisemitism seemed now rather more ritualist or
mechanistic. The main stress had moved to anti-Marxism. But only
the presentation of his ideas had been modified to some extent;
their meaning had not. His pathological hatred of Jews was
unchanged. ‘The Jew is and remains the world enemy,’ he once
more asserted in an article in the Volkischer Beobachter in February
1927, ‘and his weapon, Marxism, a plague of mankind.’

Between 1926 and 1928, Hitler became more preoccupied with
the ‘question of [living] space’ (Raumfrage) and ‘land policy’
(Bodenpolitik). Though, as we have seen, the idea of an eastern ‘land
policy’ at the expense of Russia had been present in Hitler’s mind at
the latest by the end of 1922, he had mentioned it in his public
statements — written or spoken —- only on a handful of occasions
before the end of 1926. He referred in a speech on 16 December
1925 to the ‘acquisition of land and soil’ as the best solution to
Germany’s economic problems and alluded to the colonization of
the east ‘by the sword’ in the Middle Ages. He remarked on the
need for a colonial policy in eastern Europe at Bamberg in February
1926. And he returned to the theme as a central element of his
speech at the Weimar Party Rally on 4 July 1926. The completion
of Mein Kampf, which ends with the question of eastern
colonization, must have further focused his mind on the issue. Once
he was allowed to speak in public again in spring 1927, the question
of ‘living space’ became frequently, then from the summer onwards,
obsessively emphasized in all his major addresses. Speech after
speech highlights in more or less the same language ideas that
became embodied in the ‘Second Book’, dictated during the summer
of 1928. Other economic options are mentioned only to be
dismissed. The lack of space for Germany’s population could be
overcome only by attaining power, then by force. The ‘eastern

colonization’ of the Middle Ages was praised. Conquest ‘by the
sword’ was the only method. Russia was seldom explicitly
mentioned. But the meaning was unmistakable.

The social-Darwinist, racist reading of history offered the
justification. ‘Politics is nothing more than the struggle of a people
for its existence.’ ‘It is an iron principle,’ he declared: ‘the weaker
one falls so that the strong one gains life.’ Three values determined
a people’s fate: ‘blood-’ or ‘race-value’, the ‘value of personality’,
and the ‘spirit of struggle’ or ‘self-preservation drive’. These values,
embodied in the ‘aryan race’, were threatened by the three ‘vices’ —
democracy, pacifism, and internationalism — that comprised the
work of ‘Jewish Marxism’.

The theme of personality and leadership, little emphasized before
1923, was a central thread of Hitler’s speeches and writings in the
mid-and later 1920s. The people, he said, formed a pyramid. At its
apex was ‘the genius, the great man’. Following the chaos in the
volkisch movement during the ‘leaderless time’, it was scarcely
surprising that there was heavy emphasis in 1925 and 1926 on the
leader as the focus of unity. In his refoundation speech on 27
February 1925, Hitler had stressed his task as Leader as ‘bringing
together again those who are going different ways’. The art of being
Leader lay in assembling the ‘stones of the mosaic’. The Leader was
the ‘central point’ or ‘preserver’ of the ‘idea’. This demanded, Hitler
repeatedly underlined, blind obedience and loyalty from the
followers. The cult of the Leader was thus built up as the
integrating mechanism of the movement. With his own supremacy
firmly established by mid-1926, Hitler never lost an opportunity to
highlight the ‘value of personality’ and ‘individual greatness’ as the
guiding force in Germany’s struggle and coming rebirth. He avoided
specific reference to his own claims to ‘heroic’ status. This was
unnecessary. It could be left to the growing number of converts to
the Hitler cult, and to the orchestrated outpourings of propaganda.
For Hitler himself, the ‘Fithrer myth’ was both a propaganda
weapon and a central tenet of belief. His own ‘greatness’ could be
implicitly but unmistakably underscored by repeated references to

Bismarck, Frederick the Great, and Luther, along with allusions to
Mussolini. Speaking of Bismarck (if without mentioning his name)
in May 1926, he commented: ‘It was necessary to transmit the
national idea to the mass of the people.’ ‘A giant had to fulfil this
task.’ The sustained applause showed that the meaning was not lost
on his audience.

Goebbels had been thrilled on more than one occasion in 1926 by
Hitler’s exposition of the ‘social question’. ‘Always new and
compelling’ was how Goebbels described his ideas. In reality,
Hitler’s ‘social idea’ was simplistic, diffuse, and manipulative. It
amounted to little more than what he had told his bourgeois
audience in Hamburg: winning the workers to nationalism,
destroying Marxism, and overcoming the division between
nationalism and socialism through the creation of a nebulous
‘national community’ (Volksgemeinschaft) based on racial purity and
the concept of struggle. The fusion of nationalism and socialism
would do away with the class antagonism between a nationalist
bourgeoisie and Marxist proletariat (both of which had failed in
their political goals). This would be replaced by a ‘community of
struggle’ where nationalism and socialism would be united, where
‘brain’ and ‘fist’ were reconciled, and where — denuded of Marxist
influence — the building of a new spirit for the great future struggle
of the people could be undertaken. Such ideas were neither new,
nor original. And, ultimately, they rested not on any modern form
of socialism, but on the crudest and most brutal version of
nineteenth-century imperialist and social-Darwinistic notions. Social
welfare in the trumpeted ‘national community’ did not exist for its
own sake, but to prepare for external struggle, for conquest ‘by the
sword’.

Hitler repeatedly stated that he was uninterested in day-to-day
issues. What he offered, over and over again, was the same vision of
a long-term goal, to be striven after with missionary zeal and total
commitment. Political struggle, eventual attainment of power,
destruction of the enemy, and build-up of the nation’s might were
stepping-stones to the goal. But how it was to be then attained was

left open. Hitler himself had no concrete notion. He just had the
certainty of the fanatical ‘conviction politician’ that it would be
attained. Clarity was never aimed at. The acquisition of ‘living
space’ through conquest implied at some distant future date
aggression against Russia. But it had no more precise meaning than
that. Hitler’s own firm belief in it need not be doubted. But, even
for many of his followers, in the world of the mid-1920s, with
Germany engaged diplomatically with the Soviet Union following
the Rapallo Treaty of 1922 as well as improving relations with the
western powers through the 1925 Treaty of Locarno then
membership of the League of Nations, this must have seemed little
more than sloganizing or a pipe-dream.

Even on the ‘Jewish Question’, the wild tirades, vicious as they
were, offered no concrete policies. ‘Getting rid of the Jews’ could
only reasonably be taken to mean the expulsion of all Jews from
Germany, as when Hitler called for chasing ‘that pack of Jews ...
from our Fatherland ... with an iron broom’. But even this aim
seemed less than clear when he stated — to tumultuous applause
from the stalwarts of the movement gathered in Munich’s
Hofbrauhaus on 24 February 1928 to celebrate the eighth
anniversary of the launch of the Party Programme -— that ‘the Jew’
would have to be shown ‘that we’re the bosses here; if he behaves
well, he can stay — if not, then out with him’.

In the ‘Jewish Question’, the ‘question of [living] space’, and the
‘social question’, Hitler suggested a vision of a distant utopia. He
did not chart the path to it. But no other Nazi leader or volkisch
politician could match the internal unity, simplicity, and all-
encompassing character of this ‘vision’. His sense of conviction — he
spoke frequently of his ‘mission’, ‘faith’, and of the ‘idea’ —
combined with an unrivalled talent for mobilization through
reduction to simple ‘black-white’ choices, was where the ideologue
and the propagandist came together.

The interdependence of the various strands of Hitler’s pernicious
‘world-view’ is most plainly evident in his ‘Second Book’ (an
updated statement of his views on foreign policy, left, in the event,

unpublished), dictated hurriedly to Max Amann during a stay on the
Obersalzberg in the summer of 1928. Hitler felt prompted to
produce the book by the heated debates at the time about policy
towards South Tyrol. Under Mussolini, Fascist policies of
Italianization of the largely German-speaking area had stirred
strong anti-Italian feeling in nationalist circles in Austria and
Germany, particularly in Bavaria. Hitler’s readiness to renounce
German claims on South Tyrol in the interest of an alliance with
Italy had seen him attacked by German nationalists as well as being
accused by socialists of taking bribes from Mussolini. Hitler had
dealt with the South Tyrol issue in Mein Kampf, and published the
relevant sections from the second volume as a separate pamphlet in
February 1926. When the issue flared up again in 1928, he was
driven to outline his position at length. Probably financial
considerations - Amann may well have advised against having the
‘Second Book’ compete against the second volume of Mein Kampf,
with its disappointing and diminishing sales — dissuaded Hitler from
publishing the book. But in addition, as the South Tyrol question
lost its urgency, new issues like the Young Plan arose, and Hitler
had neither time nor inclination to revise the text, it may have been
felt that its publication would have offered political hostages to
fortune.

If occasioned by the South Tyrol question, the ‘Second Book’ went
far beyond it, ranging more expansively than Mein Kampf had done
over Hitler’s broad ideas on foreign policy and ‘territorial issues’
(Raumfragen), linking them, as always, with his racial interpretation
of history and, in the final pages, with the need to destroy what he
saw as the threat of ‘Jewish domination’. But the ‘Second Book’
offered nothing new. As we have seen, the essence of Hitler’s
‘world-view’ was fully developed by the time he wrote the second
volume of Mein Kampf in 1926, existent in embryonic form, in fact,
since late 1922. The ideas dominating the ‘Second Book’ — including
the issue of South Tyrol and his interest in the growing economic
power of the United States of America — were repeatedly advanced
in Hitler’s speeches and writings from 1927 onwards. Several

passages from these speeches recur almost verbatim at key points in
the ‘Second Book’.

Long before the dictation of the ‘Second Book’, then, Hitler was a
fixated ideologue. His own inner certainty of the ‘truths’ about
history as racial struggle, and Germany’s future mission to obtain
‘living space’ and, at the same time, eradicate the power of the Jews
for ever, were of immense importance as a personal driving-force.
Their significance in attracting support for National Socialism can,
however, easily be exaggerated. The growth of the NSDAP to a
mass party had little directly to do with the arcanum of Hitler’s
personalized ‘world-view’. More complex processes have to be taken
into account.

At the end of January 1927, Saxony became the first large German
state to lift the speaking ban on Hitler. On 5 March, the Bavarian
authorities finally conceded to the pressure to allow Hitler to speak
again. His return to the public arena caused little of a stir. Reports
from the Bavarian provinces indicated little interest in the NSDAP,
for all its vigorous propaganda. Party meetings were often badly
attended. Hitler’s magic was no longer working, even in Munich. In
January 1928, the Munich police reported that ‘the advances of the
National Socialist Movement repeatedly claimed by Hitler are not
true, especially in Bavaria. In reality, interest in the movement both
in the countryside and in Munich is strongly in decline. Branch
meetings attended by 3-400 people in 1926 now have an attendance
of at most 60-80 members.’ Even the Party Rally, held for the first
time at Nuremberg, on 19-21 August 1927, despite careful
orchestration for maximum propaganda effect, failed to raise the
expected level of support or interest.

Most other German states followed the examples of Saxony and
Bavaria in lifting the ban on Hitler speaking in public. Only Prussia,
the largest state, and Anhalt held out until autumn 1928. The
authorities, it seemed with justification, could believe that the Nazi

menace had passed. Hitler no longer appeared a threat. A
confidential report by the Reich Minister of the Interior in 1927 had
already judged that the NSDAP was no more than a ‘splinter group
incapable of exerting any noticeable influence on the great mass of
the population and the course of political events’.

Though outwardly making little or no headway in the more
settled political climate of the mid-1920s, as Germany’s new
democracy at last showed signs of stability, significant
developments were taking place within the NSDAP. Eventually,
these would help to place the party in a stronger position to exploit
the new economic crisis that was to hit Germany in autumn 1929.

Most importantly, the NSDAP had become a self-conscious
‘leader-movement’, focused ideologically and organizationally on
the Hitler cult. In retrospect, the ‘leaderless time’ of 1924, and
Hitler’s obstinacy — born out of weakness — in refusing to take sides
in the internecine strife of the volkisch movement, had been
enormously advantageous. The defeat at Bamberg of those looking
to programmatic changes was, then, at the same time the victory of
those loyalists prepared to look no further than Hitler as the
embodiment of the ‘idea’. For these, the programme detached from
the leader had no meaning. And, as 1924 had proven, without Hitler
there could be no unity, and hence no movement.

The establishment of the Fiihrer cult was decisive for the
development of the Nazi Movement. Without it, as 1924 had shown,
it would have been torn apart by factionalism. With it, the still
precarious unity could be preserved by calling on loyalty to Hitler
as a prime duty. Among the party leadership, feelings had to be
subordinated to the overriding need for unity.

Within the movement, the SA had always been the most difficult
element to control — and so it would continually prove down to
1934. But here, too, Hitler was successfully able to diffuse trouble
by invoking loyalty to his own person. In May 1927, he made an
impassioned speech to the Munich stormtroopers, demoralized and
rebellious towards the SA leader Franz Pfeffer von Salomon. At the
end of his speech, he resorted to his usual ploy. He stepped down

from the rostrum, shook hands with each SA man, and gained their
renewed pledge of personal loyalty to him.

Clashes over strategy, factional disputes, personal rivalries — all
were endemic in the NSDAP. The interminable conflicts and
animosities, normally personal or tactical rather than ideological,
almost invariably stopped short of any attack on Hitler. He
intervened as little as possible. In fact, the rivalry and competition
simply showed him, according to his own concept of social-
Darwinist struggle, who among his competing underlings was the
stronger. Nor did Hitler make any effort to reconcile ideological
nuances within the party, unless they threatened to become counter-
productive by deviating the single-minded drive for power through
mass mobilization into sectarian squabbling. The Fuhrer cult was
accepted because it offered all parties the only remedy to this.
Personal loyalty to Hitler, whether genuine or forced, was the price
of unity. In some cases, Nazi leaders were wholly convinced of
Hitler’s greatness and ‘mission’. In others, their own ambitions
could only be upheld by lip-service to the supreme Leader. Either
way, the result was that Hitler’s mastery over the movement
increased to the position where it was well-nigh unchallengeable.
And either way, the transmission belt within the party faithful had
been manufactured for the subsequent extension of the Fuhrer cult
to wider sectors of the German electorate. The Leader cult was
indispensable to the party. And the subsummation of the ‘idea’ in
Hitler’s own person was necessary, if party energy was not to be
dissipated in harmful factional divides. By avoiding doctrinal
dispute, as he had done in 1924, and focusing all energies on the
one goal of obtaining power, Hitler could - sometimes with
difficulty — hold the party together. Along the way, the Fuhrer cult
had developed its own momentum.

With the build-up of the Fuhrer cult, Hitler’s image was at least
as important as his practical contribution to the modest growth of
the party in the ‘wilderness years’. Of course, a Hitler-speech
remained a major event for a local party branch. And Hitler
retained the ability in his mass-meetings to win over initially

sceptical audiences. But whatever limited success the NSDAP
enjoyed before the Depression cannot simply — or even mainly — be
attributed to Hitler. As an agitator, Hitler was distinctly less directly
prominent than he had been before the putsch. The speaking-ban
was, of course, a major hindrance in 1925 and 1926. He spoke at
only thirty-one meetings in 1925 and thirty-two in 1926, mainly
internal party affairs, a good number of them in Bavaria. In 1927,
his speeches increased in number to fifty-six, more than half of them
within Bavaria. Most of his sixty-six speeches in 1928 took place in
the first five months, up to the Reichstag election. More than two-
thirds of them were held in Bavaria. During the whole of 1929, as
the NSDAP began to gain ground in regional elections, he held only
twenty-nine speeches, all but eight in Bavaria.

One limitation on Hitler’s availability as a speaker in these years
was posed by his frequent trips to try to establish important
contacts and drum up funding for a party with chronic financial
problems. Not surprisingly, for a party in the political doldrums, his
efforts met with little success. Though (not to the liking of the
‘social-revolutionaries’ in the NSDAP) he courted Ruhr industrialists
and businessmen in a number of speeches in 1926 and 1927, which
went down well, they showed little interest in a party that seemed
to be going nowhere. The Bechsteins and Bruckmanns, long-
standing patrons, continued to give generously. But the aged Emil
Kirdorf, whom Frau Bruckmann had brought into personal contact
with Hitler, was almost alone among leading Ruhr industrialists in
sympathizing with him to the extent of joining the NSDAP, and in
making a sizeable donation of 100,000 Marks that went a long way
towards overcoming the party’s immediate financial plight. As
would remain the case, the party was heavily dependent for its
income on the contributions of ordinary members. So the
stagnation, or at best slow growth, in party membership meant
continued headaches for the party treasurer.

As earlier, Hitler paid little attention to administration and
organization. Party bosses were resigned to his lengthy absences
and inaccessibility on even important concerns. He left financial

matters to his trusted business manager Max Amann, and the party
treasurer, Franz Xaver Schwarz. Behind the scenes in Munich, Hitler
could rely in the party’s secretariat upon the indefatigable and
subservient Philipp Bouhler, the retiring but inwardly ambitious
individual who was later to play a central role in the emergence of
the ‘euthanasia action’. Above all, it was Gregor Strasser, as
Propaganda Leader between September 1926 and the end of 1927
(during which time he streamlined and coordinated propaganda
activities throughout the Reich) and especially after he was made
Organizational Leader on 2 January 1928, who built up, from the
faction-ridden and incoherently structured movement, the
nationwide organization that from 1929 onwards was in a position
to exploit the new crisis conditions. Hitler’s part in this
development was minimal, though placing Strasser in charge of
organizational matters was one of his more inspired appointments.

Hitler’s instinct, as ever, was for propaganda, not organization.
His ‘feel’, when it came to matters of mobilizing the masses, seldom
let him down. As director of party propaganda, Gregor Strasser had
been given a great deal of scope — Hitler’s usual style — to shape the
character and pattern of agitation. Following his own leanings,
Strasser had made a strong push to win over, especially, the urban
proletariat. Even to outside observers, it was plain by autumn 1927
that this strategy was not paying worthwhile dividends, and was at
the same time in danger of alienating the lower-middle-class
support of the NSDAP. Reports came in from Schleswig-Holstein,
Thuringia, Mecklenburg, Pomerania, and other areas indicating that
growing unrest in rural areas offered promising terrain for the
NSDAP. Hitler was evidently well-informed. And at a meeting of
Gau leaders on 27 November 1927 in the ‘Hotel Elefant’ in Weimar,
he announced a change of course. He made plain that significant
gains could not be expected at the coming election from ‘the
Marxists’. Small-shopkeepers, threatened by department stores, and
white-collar workers, many of them already antisemites, were
singled out as better targets. In December 1927, Hitler addressed
for the first time a rally of several thousand peasants from Lower

Saxony and Schles-wig-Holstein. In the New Year, he himself took
over the position of party Propaganda Leader. His deputy, Heinrich
Himmler, undertook the routine tasks. The future overlord of the SS
empire was at this time still in his twenties, a well-educated and
intelligent former agricultural student who had briefly worked for a
fertilizer firm and reared chickens. With his short-back-and-sides
haircut, small moustache, round glasses, and unathletic build, he
resembled a small-town bank clerk or pedantic schoolmaster.
Whatever appearances might have suggested, he had, however, few
peers in ideological fanaticism and, as time would prove, cold
ruthlessness. The young nationalist idealist, already imagining dire
conspiracies involving ‘the red International’, Jews, Jesuits, and
freemasons ranged against Germany, had joined the NSDAP in the
summer of 1923, influenced by the man whose murder he would
orchestrate eleven years later, Ernst Rohm. It was at Rohm’s side
that, on 8 November that year, the night of the putsch, he had
carried the banner at the head of the Reichskriegsflagge unit
engaged in attempting to storm the Bavarian War Ministry. From
the time of the party’s refoundation, he had been active, initially as
secretary to Gregor Strasser, then, from 1926, as Deputy Gauleiter
of Upper Bavaria-Swabia, and Deputy Reich Propaganda Leader. In
the latter capacity in the later 1920s — he was also Deputy
Reichsftihrer-SS from 1927 before being appointed to lead the SS
two years later — he proved both efficient and imaginative —
apparently coming up with the idea of blanket propaganda coverage
of a specific area during a brief period of time, something that
became a Nazi hallmark.

But significantly, and in contrast to his normal habits, Hitler
intervened directly in drafting texts and in shaping central
propaganda. In April 1928, he ‘corrected’ the interpretation of Point
17 of the party’s ‘unalterable’ 1920 Programme: ‘expropriation
without compensation’ meant, for a party based on the principle of
private property, merely the creation of legal means to take over
land not administered in the public good; that is, Jewish land-
speculation companies.

The shift in propaganda emphasis amounted to a further move
away from a ‘programmatic’ stance directed primarily at winning
workers from Marxism to a broader ‘catch-all’ approach to
mobilization. It was a pragmatic readjustment, recognizing the
possibility of a widened appeal to a variety of social groups not
previously addressed in any systematic way in party propaganda.
Unlike some in the party, wedded to a type of ‘social-revolutionary’
emotive anti-capitalism, which social groups were attracted to
Nazism was for Hitler a matter of indifference. The important thing
was that they were won over. His aim was to gain power. Any
weapon to that end was useful. But it did mean that the NSDAP
became even more of a loose coalition of competing interest-groups.
Only the absence of a clear programme and a set of utopian, distant
goals built into the image of the Leader could hold them together —
for a time.

Few Germans had Hitler on their mind in Weimar’s ‘golden years’ of
the mid-1920s. The internal developments within his party were of
neither interest nor concern to the overwhelming majority of
people. Little attention was paid to the former Munich
troublemaker who now seemed no more than a fringe irritant on
the political scene. Those who did take notice of Hitler were often
dismissive or condescending, or both.

The results of the Reichstag election on 20 May 1928 appeared to
confirm the correctness of those commentators who for years had
been preaching the end of Hitler and his movement. The electorate
showed relatively little interest in the campaign — a reflection of the
more settled conditions. With its miserable return of 2.6 per cent,
the NSDAP won only twelve seats. Electorally, it had lost ground,
compared with the Volkischer Block in December 1924. There was
at least the consolation that the twelve Nazis who entered the
Reichstag now had immunity from legal action for their venomous
attacks on opponents and — if anything even more important — daily

allowances and free rail passes for first-class travel on the
Reichsbahn to ease pressure on party finances. Among the new
deputies were Gregor Strasser, Frick, Feder, Goebbels, Ritter von
Epp — the former Freikorps leader, a new, much-trumpeted convert
from the BVP — and Hermann Goring, recently returned to the fold
after his absence since the putsch. ‘We are going into the Reichstag
... like the wolf into the sheepflock,’ Goebbels told his readers in
the Angriff, his Berlin newspaper.

There was understandable disappointment and dejection within
the party. The need for a readjustment of party propaganda and
organization was plain. Under Strasser’s organizational leadership,
greater attention was paid to the countyside, and first steps were
taken in constructing a panoply of affiliated sub-organizations that
became extremely important in tapping the specific interests of
middle-class groups.

Meanwhile, the first dark clouds were already gathering over
Germany’s economy. The mounting crisis in agriculture was leading
to widespread indebtedness, bankruptcies, forced sales of land, and
enormous bitterness in the farming community. In the biggest
industrial belt, Ruhr industrialists refused to accept an arbitration
award and locked out the whole work-force of the iron and steel
industry, leaving 230,000 workers without jobs or wages for weeks.
Unemployment was by now sharply on the rise, reaching almost 3
million by January 1929, an increase of a million over the previous
year. Politically, too, there were growing difficulties. The ‘grand
coalition’ under the SPD Chancellor Hermann Miller was shaky
from the outset. A split, and serious loss of face for the SPD,
occurred over the decision to build a battle cruiser (a policy
opposed by the Social Democrats before the election). The Ruhr iron
dispute further opened the rifts in the government and exposed it to
its critics on Left and Right. It was the first shot of the concerted
attempt by the conservative Right to roll back the social advances
made in the Weimar welfare state. The ensuing conflict over social
policy would ultimately lead to the demise of the Muller

government. And by the end of the year, the reparations issue
began to loom again. It would become acute in 1929.

In the worsening conditions of the winter of 1928-9, the NSDAP
began to attract increasing support. By the end of 1928, the number
of membership cards distributed had reached 108,717. Social groups
that had scarcely been reached before could now be tapped. In
November 1928, Hitler received a rapturous reception from 2,500
students at Munich University. Before he spoke, the meeting had
been addressed by the recently appointed Reich Leader of the Nazi
Students’ Federation, the twenty-one-year-old future Hitler Youth
leader Baldur von Schirach.

The student union elections gave Hitler an encouraging sign of
gathering Nazi strength. But it was above all in the countryside,
among the radicalized peasants, that the Nazis began to make
particularly rapid advances. In Schleswig-Holstein, bomb attacks on
government offices gave the clearest indication of the mood in the
farming community. In January 1929, radicalized peasants in the
region founded the Landvolk, an inchoate but violent protest
movement that rapidly became prey to Nazi inroads. Two months
later, following an NSDAP meeting in the village of Wohrden, a
fight between SA men and KPD supporters led to two stormtroopers
being killed and a number of others injured. Local reactions showed
graphically the potential for Nazi gains in the disaffected
countryside. There was an immediate upsurge in Nazi support in the
locality. Old peasant women now wore the party badge on their
work-smocks. From conversations with them, ran the police report,
it was clear that they had no idea of the aims of the party. But they
were certain that the government was incapable and the authorities
were squandering taxpayers’ money. They were convinced ‘that
only the National Socialists could be the saviours from this alleged
misery’. Farmers spoke of a Nazi victory through parliament taking
too long. A civil war was what was needed. The mood was
‘extraordinarily embittered’ and the population were open to all
forms of violent action. Using the incident as a propaganda
opportunity, Hitler attended the funeral of the dead SA men, and

visited those wounded. This made a deep impression on the local
inhabitants. He and the other leading Nazis were applauded as
‘liberators of the people’.

As the ‘crisis before the crisis’ - economic and political —
deepened, Hitler kept up his propaganda offensive. In the first half
of 1929 he wrote ten articles for the party press and held sixteen
major speeches before large, rapturous audiences. Four were in
Saxony, during the run-up to the state elections there on 12 May.
Outright attacks on the Jews did not figure in the speeches. The
emphasis was on the bankruptcy at home and abroad of the Weimar
system, the exploitation of international finance and the suffering of
‘small people’, the catastrophic economic consequences of
democratic rule, the social divisions that party politics caused and
replicated, and above all the need to restore German strength and
unity and gain the land to secure its future. ‘The key to the world
market has the shape of the sword,’ he declared. The only salvation
from decline was through power: ‘The entire system must be
altered. Therefore the great task is to restore to people their belief
in leadership,’ he concluded.

Hitler’s speeches were part of a well-organized propaganda
campaign, providing saturation coverage of Saxony before the
election. It was planned by Himmler, but under Hitler’s own
supervision. The growing numerical strength of the party, and the
improvements made in its organization and structure, now allowed
more extensive coverage. This in turn helped to create an image of
dynamism, drive, and energy. Local activism, and the winning of
influential figures in a community, usually held the key to Nazi
progress. Hitler had to be used sparingly — for best effect, as well as
to avoid too punishing a schedule. A Hitler speech was a major
bonus for any party branch. But in the changing conditions from
1929 onwards, the NSDAP was chalking up successes in places
where people had never seen Hitler.

The NSDAP won 5 per cent of the vote in the Saxon election. The
following month, the party gained 4 per cent in the Mecklenburg
elections — double what it had achieved the previous year in the

Reichstag election. Its two elected members held a pivotal position

in a Landtag evenly balanced between Left and Right. Towards the

end of June, Coburg, in northern Bavaria, became the first town in

Germany to elect a Nazi-run town council. By October, the NSDAP’s
share of the popular vote had reached 7 per cent in the Baden state

elections. This was still before the Wall Street Crash ushered in the

great Depression.

The revival of the reparations issue provided further grist to the
mill of Nazi agitation. The results of the deliberations of the
committee of experts, which had been working since January 1929
under the chairmanship of Owen D. Young, an American banker and
head of the General Electric Company, to regulate the payment of
reparations, were eventually signed on 7 June. Compared with the
Dawes Plan, the settlement was relatively favourable to Germany.
Repayments were to be kept low for three years, and would overall
be some 17 per cent less than under the Dawes Plan. But it would
take fifty-nine years before the reparations would finally be paid
off. The nationalist Right were outraged. Alfred Hugenberg, former
Krupp director, leader of the DNVP and press baron, controlling the
nationalist press and with a big stake in the UFA film company,
formed in July a ‘Reich Committee for the German People’s
Petition’ to organize a campaign to force the government to reject
the Young Plan. He persuaded Hitler to join. Franz Seldte and
Theodor Duesterberg from the Stahlhelm, Heinrich Clafg from the
Pan-German League, and the industrial magnate Fritz Thyssen were
all members of the committee. Hitler’s presence in this company of
capitalist tycoons and reactionaries was not to the liking of the
national revolutionary wing of the NSDAP, headed by Otto Strasser,
Gregor’s brother. But, ever the opportunist, Hitler recognized the
chances the campaign offered. The draft ‘Law against the
Enslavement of the German People’ drawn up by the committee in
September, rejecting the Young Plan and the ‘war guilt lie’,
marginally gained the necessary support to stage a plebiscite. But
when the plebiscite eventually took place, on 22 December 1929,
only 5.8 millions — 13.8 per cent of the electorate — voted for it. The

campaign had proved a failure — but not for Hitler. He and his party
had benefited from massive exposure freely afforded him in the
Hugenberg press. And he had been recognized as an equal partner
by those in high places, with good contacts to sources of funding
and influence.

Some of Hitler’s new-found bedfellows had been honoured guests
at the Party Rally that took place in Nuremberg from 1 to 4 August
1929. The deputy leader of the Stahlhelm, Theodor Duesterberg,
and Count von der Goltz, chairman of the Vereinigte Vaterlandische
Verbande (United Patriotic Associations) graced the rally with their
presence. The Ruhr industrialist, and benefactor of the party, Emil
Kirdorf had also accepted an invitation. Winifred Wagner, the Lady
of Bayreuth, was also an honoured guest. Thirty-five special trains
brought 25,000 SA and SS men and 1,300 members of the Hitler
Youth to Nuremberg. Police estimated an attendance of around 30-
40,000 in all. It was a far bigger and more grandiose spectacle than
the previous rally, two years earlier, had been. It reflected a new
confidence and optimism in a party whose membership had grown
by this time to some 130,000. And compared with two years earlier,
Hitler’s dominance was even more complete. Working sessions
simply rubber-stamped policy determined from above. Hitler
showed little interest in them. His only concern, as always, was
with the propaganda display of the rally.

He had reason to feel satisfied with the way his movement had
developed over the four years since its refoundation. The party was
now almost three times as large as it had been at the time of the
putsch, and growing fast. It was spread throughout the country, and
making headway in areas which had never been strongholds. It was
now far more tightly organized and structured. There was much less
room for dissension. Rivals in the volkisch movement had been
amalgamated or had faded into insignificance. Not least, Hitler’s
own mastery was complete. His recipe for success was unchanged:
hammer home the same message, exploit any opportunity for
agitation, and hope for external circumstances to favour the party.
But although great strides forward had been made since 1925, and

though the party was registering modest electoral gains at state
elections and acquiring a good deal of publicity, no realist could
have reckoned much to its chances of winning power. For that,
Hitler’s only hope was a massive and comprehensive crisis of the
state.

He had no notion just how quickly events would turn to the
party’s advantage. But on 3 October, Gustav Stresemann, the only
statesman of real standing in Germany, who had done most to
sustain the shaky Miller government, died following a stroke.
Three weeks later, on 24 October 1929, the largest stock-market in
the world, in Wall Street, New York, crashed. The crisis Hitler
needed was about to envelop Germany.

8
Breakthrough

The Nazi leadership did not immediately recognize the significance
of the American stock-market crash in October 1929. The Volkischer
Beobachter did not even mention Wall Street’s ‘Black Friday’. But
Germany was soon reverberating under its shock-waves. Its
dependence upon American short-term loans ensured that the
impact would be extraordinarily severe. Industrial output, prices,
and wages began the steep drop that would reach its calamitous
low-point in 1932. The agricultural crisis that had already been
radicalizing Germany’s farmers in 1928 and 1929 was sharply
intensified. By January 1930, the labour exchanges recorded
3,218,000 unemployed — some 14 per cent of the ‘working-age’
population. The true figure, taking in those on short-time, has been
estimated as over 414 million.

The protest of ordinary people who took the view that democracy
had failed them, that ‘the system’ should be swept away, became
shriller on both Left and Right. Nazi advances in regional elections
reflected the growing radicalization of the mood of the electorate.
The Young Plan plebiscite had given the party much-needed
publicity in the widely-read Hugenberg press. Its value, said Hitler,
was that it had provided ‘the occasion for a propaganda wave the
like of which had never been seen in Germany before’. It had
allowed the NSDAP to project itself as the most radical voice of the
Right, a protest-movement par excellence that had never been
tarnished with any involvement in Weimar government. In the
Baden state elections on 27 October 1929, the NSDAP won 7 per
cent of the vote. In the Ltibeck city elections a fortnight or so later,

the percentage was 8.1. Even in the Berlin council elections on 17
November, the party almost quadrupled its vote of 1928, though its
5.8 per cent was still marginal, compared with over 50 per cent that
went to the two left-wing parties. Most significantly of all, in the
Thuringian state elections held on 8 December, the NSDAP trebled
its vote of 1928 and broke the 10 per cent barrier for the first time,
recording 11.3 per cent of the 90,000 votes cast. Should the Nazi
Party exploit the situation by agreeing to enter government for the
first time but run the risk of courting unpopularity through its
participation in an increasingly discredited system? Hitler decided
the NSDAP had to enter government. Had he refused, he said, it
would have come to new elections and voters could have turned
away from the NSDAP. What happened gives an indication of the
way at this time the ‘seizure of power’ in the Reich itself was
envisaged.

Hitler demanded the two posts he saw as most important in the
Thuringian government: the Ministry of the Interior, controlling the
civil service and police; and the Ministry of Education, overseeing
culture as well as policy for school and university. ‘He who controls
both these ministries and ruthlessly and persistently exploits his
power in them can achieve extraordinary things,’ wrote Hitler.
When his nominee for both ministries, Wilhelm Frick, was rejected
— the German People’s Party (DVP) claimed it could not work with
a man who (for his part in the Beerhall Putsch) had been convicted
of high treason — Hitler went himself to Weimar and imposed an
ultimatum. If within three days Frick were not accepted, the NSDAP
would bring about new elections. Industrialists from the region,
lobbied by Hitler, put heavy pressure on the DVP - the party of big
business — and Hitler’s demands were finally accepted. Frick was
given the task of purging the civil service, police, and teachers of
revolutionary, Marxist, and democratic tendencies and bringing
education in line with National Socialist ideas.

The first Nazi experiment in government was anything but
successful. Frick’s attempts to reconstruct educational and cultural
policy on a basis of ideological racism were not well received, and

moves to nazify the police and civil service were blocked by the
Reich Ministry of the Interior. After only a year, Frick was removed
from office following a vote of no-confidence supported by the
NSDAP’s coalition partners. The strategy — to prove so fateful in
1933 — of including Nazis in government in the expectation that
they would prove incompetent and lose support was, on the basis of
the Thuringian experiment, by no means absurd.

In a letter of 2 February 1930 to an overseas party supporter
outlining the developments that led to participation in the
Thuringian government, Hitler pointed to the rapid advances the
party was making in gaining support. By the time he was writing,
party membership officially numbered 200,000 (though the actual
figures were somewhat lower). The Nazis were starting to make
their presence felt in places where they had been scarcely noticed
earlier.

Since the Young Campaign the previous autumn, rejecting the
plan for long-term repayment of reparations, the NSDAP had been
building up to around a hundred propaganda meetings a day. This
would reach a crescendo during the Reichstag election campaign
later in the summer. Many of the speakers were now of good
quality, hand-picked, well-trained, centrally controlled but able to
latch on to and exploit local issues as well as putting across the
unchanging basic message of Nazi agitation. The National Socialists
were increasingly forcing themselves on to the front pages of
newspapers. They began to penetrate the network of clubs and
associations that were the social framework of so many provincial
communities. Where local leaders, enjoying respectability and
influence, were won over, further converts often rapidly followed.
Other non-Marxist parties seemed, in the gathering crisis, to be
increasingly weak, ineffectual, and discredited, or to relate, like the
Zentrum (the Catholic party), to only one particular sector of the
population. Their disarray could only enhance the appeal of a large,
expanding, dynamic and national party, seen more and more to offer
the best chance of combating the Left, and increasingly regarded as
the only party capable of representing the interests of each section

of society in a united ‘national community’. And as increasing
numbers joined the party, paid their entry fees to the growing
number of Nazi meetings, or threw their Marks into the collection
boxes, so the funds grew that enabled still further propaganda
activity to unfold. The tireless activism was, then, already showing
signs of success even in the early months of 1930. The extraordinary
breakthrough of the September Reichstag election did not come out
of thin air.

Even with the deepening Depression and every prospect of
increasing National Socialist electoral gains, however, the road to
power was blocked. Only crass errors by the country’s rulers could
open up a path. And only a blatant disregard by Germany’s power
élites for safeguarding democracy — in fact, the hope that economic
crisis could be used as a vehicle to bring about democracy’s demise
and replace it by a form of authoritarianism — could induce such
errors. Precisely this is what happened in March 1930.

The fall of the Social Democrat Chancellor Hermann Miller and
his replacement by Heinrich Brtining of the Zentrum was the first
unnecessary step on the suicidal road of the Weimar Republic.
Without the self-destructiveness of the democratic state, without the
wish to undermine democracy of those who were meant to uphold
it, Hitler, whatever his talents as an agitator, could not have come
close to power.

The Miller administration eventually came to grief, on 27 March
1930, over the question of whether employer contributions to
unemployment insurance should be raised, as from 30 June 1930,
from 3.5 to 4 per cent of the gross wage. The issue had polarized
the ill-matched coalition partners, the SPD and DVP, since the
previous autumn. If the will had been there, a compromise would
have been found. But by the end of 1929, in the context of the
increasing economic difficulties of the Republic, the DVP had — in
company with the other ‘bourgeois’ parties - moved sharply to the
right. With no way out of the government crisis, the Chancellor
tendered his resignation on 27 March. It marked the beginning of
the end for the Weimar Republic.

The fall of Muller had in fact been planned long beforehand. In
December, Heinrich Briining, parliamentary leader of the Zentrum,
learnt that Hindenburg was determined to oust Miiller as soon as
the Young Plan had been accepted. Briining himself was earmarked
to take over as Chancellor, backed where necessary by the
President’s powers under Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution
(enabling him to issue emergency decrees to by-pass the need for
Reichstag legislation). The Reich President was anxious not to miss
the chance of creating an ‘anti-parliamentary and anti-Marxist
government’ and afraid of being forced to retain a Social Democrat
administration.

Briining was appointed Chancellor on 30 March 1930. His
problems soon became apparent. By June, he was running into
serious difficulties in his attempts to reduce public spending through
emergency decrees. When an SPD motion, supported by the NSDAP,
to withdraw his proposed decree to impose swingeing cuts in public
expenditure and higher taxes was passed by the Reichstag, Briining
sought and received, on 18 July 1930, the Reich President’s
dissolution of parliament. New elections were set for 14 September.
For democracy’s prospects in Germany, they were a catastrophe.
They were to bring the Hitler Movement’s electoral breakthrough.

The decision to dissolve the Reichstag was one of breathtaking
irresponsibility. Briining evidently took a sizeable vote for the Nazis
on board in his calculations. After all, the NSDAP had won 14.4 per
cent of the vote only a few weeks earlier in the Saxon regional
election. But in his determination to override parliamentary
government by a more authoritarian system run by presidential
decree, Briining had greatly underestimated the extent of anger and
frustration in the country, grossly miscalculating the effect of the
deep alienation and dangerous levels of popular protest. The Nazis
could hardly believe their luck. Under the direction of their newly-
appointed propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, they prepared
feverishly for a summer of unprecedented agitation.

In the meantime, internal conflict within the NSDAP only
demonstrated the extent to which Hitler now dominated the
Movement, how far it had become, over the previous five years, a
‘leader party’. The dispute, when it came to a head, crystallized
once more around the issue of whether there could be any
separation of the ‘idea’ from the Leader.

Otto Strasser, Gregor’s younger brother, had continued to use the
publications of the Kampfverlag, the Berlin publishing house which
he controlled, as a vehicle for his own version of National Socialism.
This was a vague and heady brew of radical mystical nationalism,
strident anti-capitalism, social reformism, and anti-Westernism.
Rejection of bourgeois society produced admiration for the radical
anti-capitalism of the Bolsheviks. Otto shared his doctrinaire
national-revolutionary ideas with a group of theorists who used the
Kampfverlag as the outlet for their views. As long as such notions
neither harmed the party nor impinged on his own position, Hitler
took little notice of them. He was even aware, without taking any
action, that Otto Strasser had talked of founding a new party. By
early 1930, however, the quasi-independent line of Otto Strasser
had grown shriller as Hitler had sought since the previous year to
exploit closer association with the bourgeois Right. A showdown
came closer when the Kampfverlag continued to support striking
metal-workers in Saxony in April 1930, despite Hitler’s ban, under
pressure from industrialists, on any backing of the strike by the
party.

On 21 May Hitler invited Otto Strasser to his hotel for lengthy
discussions. According to Strasser’s published account — the only one
that exists, though it rings true and was not denied by Hitler — the
key points were leadership and socialism. ‘A Leader must serve the
Idea. To this alone can we devote ourselves entirely, since it is
eternal whereas the Leader passes and can make mistakes,’ claimed
Strasser. ‘What you are saying is outrageous nonsense,’ retorted
Hitler. ‘That’s the most revolting democracy that we want nothing
more to do with. For us, the Leader is the Idea, and each party
member has to obey only the Leader.’ Strasser accused Hitler of

trying to destroy the Kampfverlag because he wanted ‘to strangle’
the ‘social revolution’ through a strategy of legality and
collaboration with the bourgeois Right. Hitler angrily denounced
Strasser’s socialism as ‘nothing but Marxism’. The mass of the
working class, he went on, wanted only bread and circuses, and
would never understand the meaning of an ideal. ‘There is only one
possible kind of revolution, and it is not economic or political or
social, but racial,’ he avowed. Pushed on his attitude towards big
business, Hitler made plain that there could be no question for him
of socialization or worker control. The only priority was for a
strong state to ensure that production was carried out in the
national interest.

The meeting broke up. Hitler’s mood was black. ‘An intellectual
white Jew, totally incapable of organization, a Marxist of the purest
ilk,’ was his withering assessment of Otto Strasser. On 4 July,
anticipating their expulsion, Strasser and twenty-five supporters
publicly announced that ‘the socialists are leaving the NSDAP’. The
rebels had in effect purged themselves.

The Strasser crisis showed, above all, the strength of Hitler’s
position. With the elimination of the Strasser clique, any lingering
ideological dispute in the party was over. Things had changed
drastically since 1925 and the days of the ‘Working Community’.
Now it was clear: Leader and Idea were one and the same.

Ill

During the summer of 1930, the election campaign built up to fever
pitch. The campaign was centrally organized by Goebbels, under
broad guidelines laid down by Hitler. Two years earlier, the press
had largely ignored the NSDAP. Now, the Brownshirts forced
themselves on to the front pages. It was impossible to ignore them.
The high level of agitation — spiced with street violence — put them
on the political map in a big way. The energy and drive of the
National Socialist agitation were truly astonishing. As many as
34,000 meetings were planned throughout Germany for the last

four weeks of the campaign. No other party remotely matched the
scale of the NSDAP’s effort.

Hitler himself held twenty big speeches in the six weeks running
up to polling-day. The attendances were massive. At least 16,000
came to listen to him in the Sportpalast in Berlin on 10 September.
Two days later, in Breslau, as many as 20-25,000 thronged into the
Jahrhunderthalle, while a further 5-6,000 were forced to listen to
the speech on loudspeakers outside. In the early 1920s, Hitler’s
speeches had been dominated by vicious attacks on the Jews. In the
later 1920s, the question of ‘living space’ became the central theme.
In the election campaign of 1930, Hitler seldom spoke explicitly of
the Jews. The crude tirades of the early 1920s were missing
altogether. ‘Living space’ figured more prominently, posed against
the alternative international competition for markets. But it was not
omnipresent as it had been in 1927-8. The key theme now was the
collapse of Germany under parliamentary democracy and party
government into a divided people with separate and conflicting
interests, which only the NSDAP could overcome by creating a new
unity of the nation, transcending class, estate, and profession.
Where the Weimar parties represented only specific interest groups,
asserted Hitler, the National Socialist Movement stood for the
nation as a whole. In speech after speech, Hitler hammered this
message home. Again and again he pilloried the Weimar system, not
now crudely and simply as the regime of the ‘November Criminals’,
but for its failed promises on tax reductions, financial management,
and employment. All parties were blamed. They were all part of the
same party system that had ruined Germany. All had had their part
in the policies that had led from Versailles through the reparations
terms agreed under the Dawes Plan to their settlement under the
Young Plan. Lack of leadership had led to the misery felt by all
sections of society. Democracy, pacifism, and internationalism had
produced powerlessness and weakness — a great nation brought to
its knees. It was time to clear out the rot.

But his speeches were not simply negative, not just an attack on
the existing system. He presented a vision, a utopia, an ideal:

national liberation through strength and unity. He did not propose
alternative policies, built into specific election promises. He offered
‘a programme, a gigantic new programme behind which must stand
not the new government, but a new German people that has ceased
to be a mixture of classes, professions, estates’. It would be, he
declared, with his usual stress on stark alternatives (and, as it
turned out, prophetically) ‘a community of a people which, beyond
all differences, will rescue the common strength of the nation, or
will take it to ruin’. Only a ‘high ideal’ could overcome the social
divisions, he stated. In place of the decayed, the old, a new Reich
had to be built on racial values, selection of the best on the basis of
achievement, strength, will, struggle, freeing the genius of the
individual personality, and re-establishing Germany’s power and
strength as a nation. Only National Socialism could bring this about.
It was not a conventional political programme. It was a political
crusade. It was not about a change of government. It was a message
of national redemption. In a climate of deepening economic gloom
and social misery, anxiety, and division, amid perceptions of the
failure and ineptitude of seemingly puny parliamentary politicians,
the appeal was a powerful one.

The message appealed not least to the idealism of a younger
generation, not old enough to have fought in the war, but not too
young to have experienced at first hand little but crisis, conflict, and
national decline. Many from this generation, born between about
1900 and 1910, coming from middle-class families, no longer rooted
in the monarchical tradition of the pre-war years, outrightly
rejecting Socialism and Communism, but alienated by the political,
economic, social, and ideological strife of the Weimar era, were on
the search for something new. Laden with all the emotive baggage
that belonged to the German notions of ‘Volk’ (ethnic people) and
‘Gemeinschaft? (community), the aim of a ‘national community’
which would overcome class divisions seemed a highly positive one.
That the notion of ‘national community’ gained its definition by
those it excluded from it, and that social harmony was to be

established through racial purity and homogeneity, were taken for
granted if not explicitly lauded.

The rhetoric of the ‘national community’ and the Fuhrer cult
stood for a rebirth for Germany in which all the various sectional
interests would have a new deal. As the economic and political
situation deteriorated, the rationality of voting for a small and weak
interest party rather than a massive and strong national party —
upholding interests but transcending them — was less and less
compelling. A vote for the Nazis could easily seem like common
sense. In this way, the NSDAP started to penetrate and destroy the
support of interest-parties such as the Bayerischer Bauernbund
(Bavarian Peasants’ League) and seriously to erode the hold of the
traditional parties such as the national-conservative DNVP in rural
areas. This process was only in its early stages in summer 1930. But
it would make rapid advances following the Nazi triumph of 14
September 1930.

What happened on that day was a political earthquake. In the most
remarkable result in German parliamentary history, the NSDAP
advanced at one stroke from the twelve seats and mere 2.6 per cent
of the vote gained in the 1928 Reichstag election, to 107 seats and
18.3 per cent, making it the second largest party in the Reichstag.
Almost 6% million Germans now voted for Hitler’s party — eight
times as many as two years earlier. The Nazi bandwagon was
rolling.

The party leadership had expected big gains. The run of successes
in the regional elections, the last of them the 14.4 per cent won in
Saxony as recently as June, pointed to that conclusion. Goebbels
had reckoned in April with about forty seats when it looked as if
there would be a dissolution of the Reichstag at that time. A week
before polling-day in September he expected ‘a massive success’.
Hitler later claimed he had thought 100 were possible. In reality, as
Goebbels admitted, the size of the victory took all in the party by

surprise. No one had expected 107 seats. Hitler was beside himself
with joy.

The political landscape had dramatically changed overnight.
Alongside the Nazis, the Communists had increased their support,
now to 13.1 per cent of the vote. Though still the largest party, the
SPD had lost ground as, marginally, did the Zentrum. But the
biggest losers were the bourgeois parties of the centre and Right.
The DNVP had dropped in successive elections since 1924 from 20.5
to only 7.0 per cent, the DVP from 10.1 to 4.7 per cent. The Nazis
were the main profiteers. One in three former DNVP voters, it has
been estimated, now turned to the NSDAP, as did one in four former
supporters of the liberal parties. Smaller, but still significant gains,
were made from all other parties. These included the SPD, KPD, and
Zentrum/BVP, though the working-class milieus dominated by the
parties of the Left and, above all, the Catholic sub-culture remained,
as they would continue to be, relatively unyielding terrain for the
NSDAP. The increased turn-out — up from 75.6 to 82 per cent — also
benefited the Nazis, though less so than has often been presumed.

The landslide was greatest in the Protestant countryside of
northern and eastern Germany. With the exception of rural parts of
Franconia, piously Protestant, the largely Catholic Bavarian
electoral districts now for the first time lagged behind the national
average. The same was true of most Catholic regions. In big cities
and industrial areas — though there were some notable exceptions,
such as Breslau and Chemnitz-Zwickau — the Nazi gains, though still
spectacular, were also below average. But in Schleswig-Holstein, the
NSDAP vote had rocketed from 4 per cent in 1928 to 27 per cent.
East Prussia, Pomerania, Hanover, and Mecklenburg were among
the other regions where Nazi support was now over 20 per cent. At
least three-quarters of Nazi voters were Protestants (or, at any rate,
non-Catholics). Significantly more men than women voted Nazi
(though this was to alter between 1930 and 1933). At least two-
fifths of Nazi support came from the middle classes. But a quarter
was drawn from the working class (though the unemployed were
more likely to vote for the KPD than for Hitler’s party). The middle

classes were indeed over-represented among Nazi voters. But the
NSDAP was no mere middle-class party, as used to be thought.
Though not in equal proportions, the Hitler Movement could
reasonably claim to have won support from all sections of society.
No other party throughout the Weimar Republic could claim the
same.

The social structure of the party’s membership points to the same
conclusion. A massive influx of members followed the September
election. As with voters, they came, if not evenly, from all sections
of society. The membership was overwhelmingly male, and only the
KPD was as youthful in its membership profile. The Protestant
middle classes were over-represented. But there was also a sizeable
working-class presence, even more pronounced in the SA and the
Hitler Youth than in the party itself. At the same time, the political
breakthrough meant that ‘respectable’ local citizens now felt ready
to join the party. Teachers, civil servants, even some Protestant
pastors were among the ‘respectable’ groups altering the party’s
social standing in the provinces. In Franconia, for example, the
NSDAP already had the appearance by 1930 of a ‘civil-service
party’. The penetration by the party of the social networks of
provincial towns and villages now began to intensify notably.

There are times — they mark the danger point for a political
system — when politicians can no longer communicate, when they
stop understanding the language of the people they are supposed to
be representing. The politicians of Weimar’s parties were well on
the way to reaching that point in 1930. Hitler had the advantage of
being undamaged by participation in unpopular government, and of
unwavering radicalism in his hostility to the Republic. He could
speak in language more and more Germans understood — the
language of bitter protest at a discredited system, the language of
national renewal and rebirth. Those not firmly anchored in an
alternative political ideology, social milieu, or denominational sub-
culture found such language increasingly intoxicating.

The Nazis had moved at one fell swoop from the fringe of the
political scene, outside the power-equation, to its heart. Briining

could now cope with the Reichstag only through the ‘toleration’ of
the SPD, which saw him as the lesser evil. The Social Democrats
entered their policy of ‘toleration’ with heavy hearts but a deep
sense of responsibility. As for Hitler, whether he was seen in a
positive or a negative sense — and there was little about him that
left people neutral or indifferent — his name was now on everyone’s
lips. He was a factor to be reckoned with. He could no longer be
ignored.

After the September elections, not just Germany but the world
outside had to take notice of Hitler. In the immediate aftermath of
his electoral triumph, the trial of three young Reichswehr officers
from a regiment stationed in Ulm, whose Nazi sympathies saw them
accused of ‘Preparing to Commit High Treason’ through working
towards a military putsch with the NSDAP and breaching
regulations banning members of the Reichswehr from activities
aimed at altering the constitution, gave Hitler the chance, now with
the eyes of the world’s press on him, of underlining his party’s
commitment to legality. The trial of the officers, Hanns Ludin,
Richard Scheringer, and Hans Friedrich Wendt, began in Leipzig on
23 September. On the first day, Wendt’s defence counsel, Hans
Frank, was given permission to summon Hitler as a witness. Two
days later, huge crowds demonstrated outside the court building in
favour of Hitler as the leader of the Reichstag’s second largest party
went into the witness-box to face the red-robed judges of the
highest court in the land.

Once more he was allowed to use a court of law for propaganda
purposes. The judge even warned him on one occasion, as he
heatedly denied any intention of undermining the Reichswehr, to
avoid turning his testimony into a propaganda speech. It was to
little avail. Hitler emphasized that his movement would take power
by legal means and that the Reichswehr — again becoming ‘a great
German people’s army’ — would be ‘the basis for the German future’.
He declared that he had never wanted to pursue his ideals by illegal
measures. He used the exclusion of Otto Strasser to dissociate
himself from those in the movement who had been ‘revolutionaries’.

But he assured the presiding judge: ‘If our movement is victorious in
its legal struggle, then there will be a German State Court and
November 1918 will find its atonement, and heads will roll.’ This
brought cheers and cries of ‘bravo’ from onlookers in the courtroom
— and an immediate admonishment from the court president,
reminding them that they were ‘neither in the theatre nor in a
political meeting’. Hitler expected, he continued, that the NSDAP
would win a majority following two or three further elections.
‘Then it must come to a National Socialist rising, and we will shape
the state as we want to have it.’ When asked how he envisaged the
erection of the Third Reich, Hitler replied: ‘The National Socialist
Movement will seek to attain its aim in this state by constitutional
means. The constitution shows us only the methods, not the goal. In
this constitutional way, we will try to gain decisive majorities in the
legislative bodies in order, in the moment this is successful, to pour
the state into the mould that matches our ideas.’ He repeated that
this would only be done constitutionally. He was finally sworn in on
oath to the truth of his testimony. Goebbels told Scheringer, one of
the defendants, that Hitler’s oath was ‘a brilliant move’. ‘Now we
are strictly legal,’ he is said to have exclaimed. The propaganda boss
was delighted at the ‘fabulous’ press reportage. Hitler’s newly
appointed Foreign Press Chief, Putzi Hanfstaengl, saw to it that
there was wide coverage of the trial abroad. He also placed three
articles by Hitler on the aims of the movement in the Hearst press,
the powerful American media concern, at a handsome fee of 1,000
Marks for each. Hitler said it was what he needed to be able now to
stay at the Kaiserhof Hotel — plush, well situated near the heart of
government, and his headquarters in the capital until 1933 —- when
he went to Berlin.

What Hitler said in the Leipzig Reichswehr trial - which ended on
4 October in eighteen-month custodial sentences on each of the
three Reichswehr officers and the cashiering from the army of Ludin
and Scheringer — was nothing new. He had been anxious for months
to emphasize his ‘legal’ path to power. But the massive publicity
surrounding the trial ensured that his declaration now made

maximum impact. The belief that Hitler had broken with his
revolutionary past helped to win him further support in
‘respectable’ circles.

There were those who encouraged Brtining after the election to
take the NSDAP into a coalition government, arguing that
government responsibility would put the Nazis to the test and limit
their agitation. Briining rejected such a notion out of hand, though
he did not rule out cooperation at some future date should the party
hold by the principle of legality. After deflecting Hitler’s request for
an audience immediately after the election, Briining did arrange to
see him — as he did the leaders of the other parties — in early
October. Their meeting on 5 October, which took place to avoid
publicity in the apartment of Reich Minister Treviranus, established,
however, that there was no prospect of cooperation. A chasm
separated them. After Briining’s careful statement of the
government’s foreign policy — a delicate strategy aimed at acquiring
a breathing-space leading to the ultimate removal of reparations —
Hitler responded with an hour-long monologue. He simply ignored
the issues Bruning had raised. He was soon haranguing the four
persons present — Frick and Gregor Strasser were there as well as
Briining and Treviranus — as if he were addressing a mass rally.
Brtining was struck by the number of times Hitler used the word
‘annihilate’ (‘vernichten’). He was going to ‘annihilate’ the KPD, the
SPD, ‘the Reaction’, France as Germany’s arch-enemy, and Russia as
the home of Bolshevism. It was plain to the Chancellor, so Briining
later remarked, that Hitler’s basic principle would always be: ‘First
power, then politics.’ Briining clearly saw Hitler as a fanatic —
unsophisticated, but dangerous. Though they parted amicably
enough, Hitler formed a deep loathing towards Brtining, one taking
on manic proportions and permeating the whole party.

Hitler was left to continue his relentless, unbridled opposition to
a system whose symbolic hate-figure was now Chancellor Brtining.
Continuing the agitation was, in any case, what Hitler, like
Goebbels, preferred. That was his instinct. ‘Don’t write “victory” on
your banners any longer,’ Hitler had told his supporters

immediately after the election. ‘Write the word in its place that
suits us better: “struggle!” ’ In any case, it was the only option
available. As one contemporary put it, the Nazis followed the
maxim: ‘ “After a victory, fasten on the helmet more tightly” ...
Following the election victory they arranged 70,000 meetings Again
an “avalanche” passed through the Reich ... Town after town,
village after village is stormed.’ The election victory made this
continued high level of agitation possible. The new interest in the
party meant a vast influx of new members bringing new funds that
could be used for the organization of still further propaganda and
new activists to carry it out. Success bred success. The prospect of
victory now presented itself as a real one. Everything had to be
subordinated to this single goal. The massive but shallow,
organizationally somewhat ramshackle, protest movement — a loose
amalgam of different interests bonded by the politics of utopia —
could be sustained only by the NSDAP coming to power within a
relatively short time, probably something like the space of two or
three years. This was to create mounting pressure on Hitler. All he
could do for the present was what he had always done best: step up
the agitation still further.

Behind the public persona, the private individual was difficult to
locate. Politics had increasingly consumed Hitler since 1919. There
was an extraordinary gulf between his political effectiveness, the
magnetism not just felt by ecstatic crowds in mass rallies but by
those who were frequently in his company, and the emptiness of
what was left of an existence outside politics. Those who knew
Hitler personally around this time found him an enigma. ‘In my
recollection, there is no rounded image of Hitler’s personality,’
reflected Putzi Hanfstaengl many years later. ‘Rather, there are a
number of images and shapes, all called Adolf Hitler and which were
all Adolf Hitler, that can only with difficulty be brought together in
overall relation to each other. He could be charming and then a

little later utter opinions that hinted at a horrifying abyss. He could
develop grand ideas and be primitive to the point of banality. He
could fill millions with the conviction that only his will and strength
of character guaranteed victory. And at the same time, even as
Chancellor, he could remain a bohemian whose unreliability drove
his colleagues to despair.’

For Franz Pfeffer von Salomon, the head of the SA until his
dismissal in August 1930, Hitler combined the qualities of common
soldier and artist. ‘A trooper with gypsy blood’ was, given Nazi
racial thinking, Pfeffer’s reported extraordinary characterization. He
thought Hitler had something like a sixth sense in politics, ‘a
supernatural talent’. But he wondered whether he was at bottom
only a type of Freikorps leader, a revolutionary who might have
difficulty in becoming a statesman after the movement had taken
power. Pfeffer took Hitler to be a genius, something the world
might experience only once in a thousand years. But the human side
of Hitler, in his view, was deficient. Pfeffer, torn between adulation
and criticism, saw him as a split personality, full of personal
inhibitions in conflict with the ‘genius’ inside him, arising from his
upbringing and education, and consuming him. Gregor Strasser,
retaining his own critical distance from the fully-blown Fuhrer cult,
was nevertheless also, Otto Wagener recounted, prepared to see
‘genius’ of a kind in Hitler. ‘Whatever there is about him that is
unpleasant,’ Otto Erbersdobler, Gauleiter of Lower Bavaria, later
recalled Gregor Strasser saying, ‘the man has a prophetic talent for
reading great political problems correctly and doing the right thing
at the opportune moment despite apparently insuperable
difficulties.’ Such unusual talent as Strasser was ready to grant
Hitler lay, however, as he saw it, in instinct rather than in any
ability to systematize ideas.

Otto Wagener, who had been made SA Chief of Staff in 1929, was
among those totally entranced by Hitler. His captivation by this
‘rare personality’ had still not deserted him many years later when
he compiled his memoirs in British captivity. But he, too, was
unsure what to make of Hitler. After hearing him one day in such a

towering rage — it was a row with Pfeffer about the relations
between the SA and SS - that his voice reverberated through the
entire party headquarters, Wagener thought there was something in
him resembling ‘an Asiatic will for destruction’ (a term still
betraying after the war Wagener’s entrenchment in Nazi racial
stereotypes). ‘Not genius, but hatred; not overriding greatness, but
rage born of an inferiority complex; not Germanic heroism, but the
Hun’s thirst for revenge’ was how, many years later, using Nazi-
style parlance in describing Hitler’s alleged descent from the Huns,
he summarized his impressions. In his incomprehension — a mixture
of sycophantic admiration and awestruck fear - Wagener was
reduced to seeing in Hitler’s character something ‘foreign’ and
‘diabolical’. Hitler remained for him altogether a puzzle.

Even for leading figures in the Nazi movement such as Pfeffer
and Wagener, Hitler was a remote figure. He had moved in 1929
from his shabby flat in Thierschstrafse to a luxury apartment in
Prinzregentenplatz in Munich’s fashionable Bogenhausen. It
matched the change from the beerhall rabble-rouser to politician
cavorting with the conservative establishment. He seldom had
guests, or entertained. When he did, the atmosphere was always
stiff and formal. Obsessives rarely make good or interesting
company, except in the eyes of those who share the obsession or
those in awe of or dependent upon such an unbalanced personality.
Hitler preferred, as he always had done, the usual afternoon round
in Café Heck, where cronies and admirers would listen — fawningly,
attentively, or with concealed boredom - to his monologues on the
party’s early history for the umpteenth time, or tales of the war, ‘his
inexhaustible favourite theme’.

Only with very few people was he on the familiar ‘Du’ terms. He
would address most Nazi leaders by their surname alone. ‘Mein
Fuhrer’ had not yet fully established itself, as it would do after
1933, as their normal mode of address to him. For those in his
entourage he was known simply as ‘the boss’ (der Chef). Some, like
Hanfstaeng]l or ‘court’ photographer Heinrich Hoffmann, insisted on
a simple ‘Herr Hitler’. The remoteness of his personality was

complemented by the need to avoid the familiarity which could
have brought with it contempt for his position as supreme Leader.
The aura around him dared not be sullied in any way. Along with
the remoteness went distrust. Important matters were discussed
only with small - and changing — groups or individuals. That way,
Hitler remained in full control, never bound by any advice of formal
bodies, never needing to adjudicate on disagreements between his
paladins. With his fixed views and dominant personality, he was
able, as Gregor Strasser pointed out, to overwhelm any individual in
his presence, even those initially sceptical. This in turn strengthened
his self-confidence, his feeling of infallibility. In contrast, he felt
uncomfortable with those who posed awkward questions or counter-
arguments. Since his ‘intuition’ — by which, between the lines,
Strasser meant his ideological dogmatism coupled with tactical
flexibility and opportunism — could not in itself be combated by
logical argument, the party’s organizational leader went on, Hitler
invariably dismissed any objections as coming from small-minded
know-alls. But he registered who the critics were. Sooner or later,
they would fall from grace.

Some of the most important matters, he discussed, if at all, only
with those in his close circle — the group of adjutants, chauffeurs,
and long-standing cronies such as Julius Schaub (his general
factotum), Heinrich Hoffmann (his photographer), and Sepp
Dietrich (later head of his SS bodyguard). Distrust — and vanity —
went hand in hand with his type of leadership, in Gregor Strasser’s
view. The danger, he pointed out with reference to the dismissal of
Pfeffer, was the self-selection of what Hitler wanted to hear and the
negative reaction towards the bearer of bad tidings. There was
something other-worldly about Hitler, thought Strasser; a lack of
knowledge of human beings, and with it a lack of sound judgement
of them. Hitler lived without any bonds to another human being,
Strasser went on. ‘He doesn’t smoke, he doesn’t drink, he eats
almost nothing but greenstuff, he doesn’t touch any woman! How
are we supposed to grasp him to put him across to other people?’

Hitler contributed as good as nothing to the running and
organization of the massively expanded Nazi movement. His ‘work-
style’ (if it could be called such) was unchanged from the days when
the NSDAP was a tiny, insignificant volkisch sect. He was incapable
of systematic work and took no interest in it. He was as chaotic and
dilettante as ever. He had found the role where he could fully
indulge the unordered, indisciplined, and indolent lifestyle that had
never altered since his pampered youth in Linz and drop-out years
in Vienna. He had a huge ‘work-room’ in the new ‘Brown House’ - a
building of tasteless grandiosity that he was singularly proud of.
Pictures of Frederick the Great and a heroic scene of the List
Regiment’s first battle in Flanders in 1914 adorned the walls. A
monumental bust of Mussolini stood beside the outsized furniture.
Smoking was forbidden. To call it Hitler’s ‘work-room’ was a nice
euphemism. Hitler rarely did any work there. Hanfstaengl, who had
his own room in the building, had few memories of Hitler’s room
since he had seen the party leader there so seldom. Even the big
painting of Frederick the Great, noted the former foreign press
chief, could not motivate Hitler to follow the example of the
Prussian king in diligent attention to duty. He had no regular
working hours. Appointments were there to be broken. Hanfstaengl
had often to chase through Munich looking for the party leader to
make sure he kept appointments with journalists. He could
invariably find him at four o’clock in the afternoon, surrounded by
his admirers, holding forth in the Café Heck. Party workers at
headquarters were no more favoured. They could never find a fixed
time to see Hitler, even about extremely important business. If they
managed, clutching their files, to catch him when he entered the
Brown House, he would as often as not be called to the telephone
and then apologize that he had to leave immediately and would be
back the next day. Should they manage to have their business
attended to, it was normally dispatched with little attention to
detail. Hitler would in his usual manner turn the point at issue into
a matter on which, pacing up and down the room, he would
pontificate for an hour in a lengthy monologue. Often he would
completely ignore something brought to his attention, deviating at a

tangent into some current whim. ‘If Hitler gets a cue to something
he is interested in — but that’s something different every day,’
Pfeffer is reported to have told Wagener in 1930, ‘then he takes
over the conversation and the point of the discussion is shelved.’ On
matters he did not understand, or where a decision was awkward,
he simply avoided discussion.

This extraordinary way of operating was certainly built into
Hitler’s personality. Masterful and domineering, but uncertain and
hesitant; unwilling to take decisions, yet then prepared to take
decisions bolder than anyone else could contemplate; and refusal,
once made, to take back any decision: these are part of the puzzle of
Hitler’s strange personality. If the domineering traits were signs of
a deep inner uncertainty, the overbearing features the reflection of
an underlying inferiority complex, then the hidden personality
disorder must have been one of monumental proportions. To ascribe
the problem to such a cause re-describes rather than explains it. In
any case, Hitler’s peculiar leadership style was more than just a
matter of personality, or instinctive social-Darwinist inclination to
let the winner emerge after a process of struggle. It reflected too
the unceasing necessity to protect his position as Leader. Acting out
the Leader’s role could never be halted. The famous handshake and
steely blue eyes were part of the act. Even leading figures in the
party never ceased to be impressed with the apparent sincerity and
bond of loyalty and comradeship that they thought accompanied
Hitler’s unusually long handshake and unblinking stare into their
eyes. They were too in awe of Hitler to realize what an elementary
theatrical trick it was. The greater became the nimbus of the
infallible leader, the less the ‘human’ Hitler, capable of mistakes and
misjudgements, could be allowed on view. The ‘person’ Hitler was
disappearing more and more into the ‘role’ of the almighty and
omniscient Leader.

Very occasionally, the mask slipped. Albert Krebs, the one-time
Gauleiter of Hamburg, related a scene from early 1932 that
reminded him of a French comedy. From the corridor of the elegant
Hotel Atlantik in Hamburg he could hear Hitler plaintively

shouting: ‘My soup, [I want] my soup.’ Krebs found him minutes
later hunched over a round table in his room, slurping his vegetable
soup, looking anything other than a hero of the people. He
appeared tired and depressed. He ignored the copy of his speech the
previous night that Krebs had brought him, and to the Gauleiter’s
astonishment, asked him instead what he thought of a vegetarian
diet. Fully in character, Hitler launched, not waiting for an answer,
into a lengthy diatribe on vegetarianism. It struck Krebs as a cranky
outburst, aimed at overpowering, not persuading, the listener. But
what imprinted the scene on Krebs’s memory was how Hitler
revealed himself as an acute hypochondriac to one to whom he had
presented himself up to then ‘only as the political leader, never as a
human being’. Krebs did not presume that Hitler was suddenly
regarding him as a confidant. He took it rather as a sign of the party
leader’s ‘inner instability’. It was an unexpected show of human
weakness which, Krebs plausibly speculated, was over-compensated
by an unquenchable thirst for power and resort to violence.
According to Krebs, Hitler explained that a variety of worrying
symptoms — outbreaks of sweating, nervous tension, trembling of
muscles, and stomach cramps — had persuaded him to become a
vegetarian. He took the stomach cramps to be the beginnings of
cancer, leaving him only a few years to complete ‘the gigantic tasks’
he had set himself. ‘I must come to power before long ... I must, I
must,’ Krebs has him shouting. But with this, he gained control of
himself again. His body-language showed he was over his
temporary depression. His attendants were suddenly called, orders
were given out, telephone calls booked, meetings arranged. ‘The
human being Hitler had been transformed back into the “Leader”.’
The mask was in place again.

Hitler’s style of leadership functioned precisely because of the
readiness of all his subordinates to accept his unique standing in the
party, and their belief that such eccentricities of behaviour had
simply to be taken on board in someone they saw as a political
genius. ‘He always needs people who can translate his ideologies
into reality so that they can be implemented,’ Pfeffer is reported as

stating. Hitler’s way was, in fact, not to hand out streams of orders
to shape important political decisions. Where possible, he avoided
decisions. Rather, he laid out — often in his diffuse and opinionated
fashion — his ideas at length and repeatedly. These provided the
general guidelines and direction for policy-making. Others had to
interpret from his comments how they thought he wanted them to
act and ‘work towards’ his distant objectives. ‘If they could all work
in this way,’ Hitler was reported as stating from time to time, ‘if
they could all strive with firm, conscious tenacity towards a
common, distant goal, then the ultimate goal must one day be
achieved. That mistakes will be made is human. It is a pity. But that
will be overcome if a common goal is constantly adopted as a
guideline.’ This instinctive way of operating, embedded in Hitler’s
social-Darwinist approach, not only unleashed ferocious competition
among those in the party — later in the state — trying to reach the
‘correct’ interpretation of Hitler’s intentions. It also meant that
Hitler, the unchallenged fount of ideological orthodoxy by this time,
could always side with those who had come out on top in the
relentless struggle going on below him, with those who had best
proven that they were following the ‘right guidelines’. And since
only Hitler could determine this, his power position was massively
enhanced.

Inaccessibility, sporadic and impulsive interventions,
unpredictability, lack of a regular working pattern, administrative
disinterest, and ready resort to long-winded monologues instead of
attention to detail were all hallmarks of Hitler’s style as party
leader. They were compatible — at least in the short term — with a
‘leader party’ whose exclusive middle-range goal was getting
power. After 1933, the same features would become hallmarks of
Hitler’s style as dictator with supreme power over the German
state. They would be incompatible with the bureaucratic regulation
of a sophisticated state apparatus and would become a guarantee of
escalating governmental disorder.

At the beginning of 1931, a familiar, scarred face not seen for some
time returned to the scene. Ernst Rohm, recalled by Hitler from his
self-imposed exile as a military adviser to the Bolivian army, was
back. He took up his appointment as new Chief of Staff of the SA on
January.

The case of Otto Strasser had not been the only crisis that the
party leadership had had to deal with during 1930. More serious,
potentially, had been the crisis within the SA. It had been
simmering for some time before it exploded in the summer of 1930,
during the election campaign. In reality, the crisis merely brought
to a head — not for the last time — the structural conflict built into
the NSDAP between the party’s organization and that of the SA.
Impatience at the slow, legal route to power coupled with a sense of
being undervalued and financially disadvantaged had prompted a
short-lived, but serious, rebellion of the Berlin SA in late August. It
had ended with an oath of loyalty to Hitler on behalf of all SA men,
together with substantial financial improvements for the SA
deriving from increased party dues. Pfeffer, the SA leader, resigned.
Hitler himself had taken over the supreme leadership of the SA and
SS. The claim within the SA leadership for a high degree of
autonomy from the party leadership was, however, undiminished.
The scope for continued conflict was still there.

This was the situation awaiting the return of Rohm, not as
supreme head but as chief of staff, which was announced by Hitler
to assembled SA leaders in Munich on 30 November 1930. Rohm’s
high standing from the pre-putsch era, together with his lack of
involvement in any of the recent intrigues, made his appointment a
sensible one. However, his notorious homosexuality was soon used
by those SA subordinates who resented his leadership to try to
undermine the position of the new chief of staff. Hitler was forced
as early as 3 February 1931 to refute attacks on ‘things that are
purely in the private sphere’, and to stress that the SA was not a
‘moral establishment’ but ‘a band of rough fighters’.

ROohm’s moral standards were not the real point at issue. Hitler’s
action the previous summer had defused the immediate crisis. But it

was papering over the cracks. The tension remained. Neither the
precise role nor degree of autonomy of the SA had been fully
clarified. Given the character of the Nazi Movement and the way
the SA had emerged within it, the structural problem was insoluble.
And the putschist strain, always present in the SA, was resurfacing.
The advocacy of taking power by force, advanced in articles in
February 1931 in the Berlin party newspaper Der Angriff by Walter
Stennes, the SA leader in the eastern regions of Germany and the
chief instigator of the 1930 SA rebellion, was increasingly alarming
to the Nazi leadership. Such noises flatly contradicted, and directly
placed in question, the commitment to legality that Hitler had
made, most publicly and on oath, following the Reichswehr trial in
Leipzig the previous September, and had stressed on numerous
occasions since then. The spectre of a ban on the party loomed very
much larger with the promulgation of an emergency decree on 28
March, giving the Bruning government wide-ranging powers to
combat political ‘excesses’. ‘The party, above all the SA, seems to be
facing a ban,’ wrote Goebbels in his diary. Hitler ordered the
strictest compliance with the emergency decree by all members of
the party, SA, and SS. But Stennes was not prepared to yield. ‘It is
the most serious crisis the party has had to go through,’ commented
Goebbels.

When the Berlin SA occupied party headquarters in the city then
directly attacked Hitler’s leadership, it was high time to take action.
Stennes was deposed as SA leader in eastern Germany. Hitler and
Goebbels worked hard to ensure declarations of loyalty from all the
Gaue. Stennes, increasingly revolutionary in tone, succeeded in
winning support from parts of the SA in Berlin, Schleswig-Holstein,
Silesia, and Pomerania. But his success was short-lived. A full-scale
rebellion did not occur. On 4 April, Hitler published in the Volkischer
Beobachter a lengthy and cleverly constructed denunciation of
Stennes and an emotional appeal to the loyalty of SA men. Even
before he wrote, the revolt was crumbling. Support for Stennes
evaporated. About 500 SA men in north and eastern Germany were
purged. The rest came back into line.

The crisis was over. The SA had been put back on the leash. It
would be kept there with difficulty until the ‘seizure of power’.
Then, the pent-up violence would only be fully released in the first
months of 1933. Under Rohm’s hand, nevertheless, the SA was
returning to its character as a paramilitary formation — and now a
much more formidable one than it had been in the early 1920s.
Rohm had behaved with exemplary loyalty to Hitler during the
Stennes crisis. But his own emphasis on the ‘primacy of the soldier’,
and his ambitions, suppressed as they were in 1931, for the
transformation of the SA into a popular militia, bore the seeds of
conflict still to come. It prefigured the course of events which would
reach their denouement only in June 1934.

Vil

Not only political, but personal crisis beset Hitler in 1931. On
moving in 1929 into his spacious new apartment in
Prinzregentenplatz, his niece, Geli Raubal, who had been living with
her mother in Haus Wachenfeld on the Obersalzberg, had come to
join him. During the following two years she was frequently seen in
public with Hitler. Rumours already abounded about the nature of
her relations with ‘Uncle Alf ’, as she called him. On the morning of
19 September 1931, aged twenty-three, she was found dead in
Hitler’s flat, shot with his pistol.

Hitler’s relations with women, as we have already remarked,
were in some respects abnormal. He liked the company of women,
especially pretty ones, best of all young ones. He flattered them,
sometimes flirted with them, called them — in his patronizing
Viennese petty-bourgeois manner — ‘my little princess’, or ‘my little
countess’. In the mid-1920s, he encouraged the infatuation of a
lovestruck young girl, Maria (Mizzi or Mimi) Reiter. But the
devotion was entirely one-sided. For Hitler, Mimi was no more than
a passing flirtation. Occasionally, if the stories are to be believed,
he made a clumsy attempt at some physical contact, as in the case
of Helene Hanfstaengl and Henrietta Hoffmann, the daughter of his

photographer who was to marry Baldur von Schirach (from 30
October 1931 the Reich Youth Leader of the NSDAP). His name was
linked at various times with women from as diverse backgrounds as
Jenny Haug, the sister of his chauffeur in the early years, and
Winifred Wagner, the Bayreuth maestro’s daughter-in-law. But,
whatever the basis of the rumours — often malicious, exaggerated,
or invented — none of his liaisons, it seems, had been more than
superficial. No deep feelings were ever stirred. Women were for
Hitler an object, an adornment in a ‘men’s world’. Whether in the
Men’s Home in Vienna, the regiment during the war, the Munich
barracks until his discharge, and his regular gatherings of party
cronies in Café Neumaier or Café Heck in the 1920s, Hitler’s
environment had always been overwhelmingly male. ‘Very
occasionally a woman would be admitted to our intimate circle,’
recalled Heinrich Hoffmann, ‘but she never was allowed to become
the centre of it, and had to remain seen but not heard ... She could,
occasionally, take a small part in the conversation, but never was
she allowed to hold forth or to contradict Hitler.’ Beginning with
the semi-mythical Stefanie in Linz, Hitler’s relations with women
had usually been at a distance, a matter of affectation, not emotion.
Nor was his long-standing relationship with Eva Braun, one of
Hoffmann’s employees whom he had first met in autumn 1929, an
exception. ‘To him,’ remarked Hoffmann, ‘she was just an attractive
little thing, in whom, in spite of her inconsequential and feather-
brained outlook — or perhaps just because of it — he found the type
of relaxation and repose he sought ... But never, in voice, look or
gesture, did he ever behave in a way that suggested any deeper
interest in her.’

It was different with Geli. Whatever the exact nature of the
relationship — and all accounts are based heavily upon guesswork
and hearsay — it seems certain that Hitler, for the first and only time
in his life (if we leave his mother out of consideration), became
emotionally dependent on a woman. Whether his involvement with
Geli was explicitly sexual cannot be known beyond doubt. Some
have hinted darkly at the incestuous relationships in Hitler’s

ancestry. But lurid stories of alleged deviant sexual practices put
about by Otto Strasser ought to be viewed as the fanciful anti-Hitler
propaganda of an outright political enemy. Other tales, also to be
treated with scepticism, circulated of a compromising letter and of
pornographic drawings by Hitler that had to be bought off a
blackmailer by the Party Treasurer Schwarz. But whether actively
sexual or not, Hitler’s behaviour towards Geli has all the traits of a
strong, latent at least, sexual dependence. This manifested itself in
such extreme shows of jealousy and domineering possessiveness
that a crisis in the relationship was inevitable.

Geli, broad-featured, with dark-brown, wavy hair, was no
stunning beauty but nonetheless, all accounts agree, a vivacious,
extrovert, attractive young woman. She livened up the gatherings in
Café Heck. Hitler allowed her, something he permitted no one else,
to become the centre of attraction. He took her everywhere with
him — to the theatre, concerts, the opera, the cinema, restaurants,
for drives in the countryside, picnics, even shopping for clothes. He
sang her praises, showed her off. Geli was in Munich ostensibly to
study at the university. But little studying was done. Hitler paid for
singing lessons for her. But she was clearly never going to make an
operatic heroine. She was bored by her lessons. She was more
interested in having a good time. Flighty and flirtatious, she had no
shortage of male admirers and was not backward in encouraging
them. When Hitler found out about Geli’s liaison with Emil Maurice,
his bodyguard and chauffeur, there was such a scene that Maurice
feared Hitler was going to shoot him. He was soon forced out of
Hitler’s employment. Geli was sent to cool her ardour under the
watchful eye of Frau Bruckmann. Hitler’s jealous possessiveness
took on pathological proportions. If she went out without him, Geli
was chaperoned, and had to be home early. Everything she did was
monitored and controlled. She was effectively a prisoner. She
resented it bitterly. ‘My uncle is a monster,’ she is reported as
saying. ‘No one can imagine what he demands of me.’

By mid-September 1931 she had had enough. She planned to
return to Vienna. It was later rumoured that she had a new

boyfriend there, even that he was a Jewish artist whose child she
was expecting. Geli’s mother, Angela Raubal, told American
interrogators after the war that her daughter had wanted to marry a
violinist from Linz, but that she and her half-brother, Adolf, had
forbidden her to see the man. At any rate it seems certain that Geli
was desperate to get away from her uncle’s clutches. Whether he
had been physically maltreating her is again impossible to ascertain.
It was said that her nose was broken and there were other
indications of physical violence, when her body was found. Once
more the evidence is too flimsy to be certain, and the story was one
put out by Hitler’s political enemies. The police doctor who
examined the body, and two women who laid out the corpse, found
no wounds or bleeding on the face. But that Hitler was at the very
least subjecting his niece to intense psychological pressure cannot
be doubted. According to the version put out a few days later by the
Socialist Mtinchener Post - vehemently denied in a public statement
by Hitler — during a heated argument on Friday 18 September he
refused to let her go to Vienna. Later that day, Hitler and his
entourage departed for Nuremberg. He had already left his hotel the
next morning when he was urgently recalled to be told the news
that Geli had been found dead in his apartment, shot with his
revolver. He immediately raced back to Munich — in such a rush
that his car was reported by the police for speeding about halfway
between Nuremberg and Munich.

Hitler’s political enemies had a field day. There were no holds
barred on the newspaper reports. Stories of violent rows and
physical mistreatment mingled with sexual innuendo and even the
allegation that Hitler had either killed Geli himself or had had her
murdered to prevent scandal. Hitler himself was not in Munich
when his niece died. And it is not easy to see the reasoning for a
commissioned murder to prevent a scandal being carried out in his
own flat. As it was, the scandal was enormous. The party’s own line
that the killing had been an accident, which had occurred when Geli
was playing with Hitler’s gun, also lacked all conviction. The truth
will never be known. But suicide — possibly intended as a cri de

coeur that went wrong -— driven by the need to escape from the vice
of her uncle’s clammy possessiveness and — perhaps violent —
jealousy, seems the most likely explanation.

To go from later, perhaps exaggerated, reports, Hitler appears to
have been near-hysterical, then fallen into an intense depression.
Those close to him had never seen him in such a state. He seemed to
be on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He allegedly spoke of
giving up politics and finishing it all. There were fears that he might
be suicidal. Hans Frank’s account implies, however, that his despair
at the scandal and press campaign against him outweighed any
personal grief during these days. He took refuge in the house of his
publisher, Adolf Miller, on the shores of the Tegernsee. Frank used
legal means to block the press attacks.

Whatever the depth of Hitler’s grief, politics came first. He did
not attend Geli’s funeral in Vienna on 24 September. He was
speaking that evening before a crowd of thousands in Hamburg,
where he received an even more rapturous reception than usual.
According to one person who was there, he looked ‘very strained’
but spoke well. He was back in business. More than ever, the
orgiastic frenzy he worked himself up into during his big public
addresses, and the response he encountered in what he saw as the
‘feminine mass’, provided a substitute for the emptiness and lack of
emotional bonds in his private life.

Two days later, with permission of the Austrian authorities, he
visited Geli’s grave in Vienna’s sprawling Central Cemetery.
Thereafter, he was suddenly able to snap out of his depression. All
at once, the crisis was over.

Some who saw Hitler at close quarters were convinced that Geli
could have exerted a restraining influence upon him. It is a highly
dubious theory. His emotional involvement with Geli, whatever its
precise nature, was — everything points to this - more intense than
any other human relationship he had before or after. There was
something both obsessive and cloyingly sentimental about the way
her rooms in the Prinzregentenplatz apartment and in Haus
Wachenfeld were turned into shrines. In a personal sense, Geli was

indeed irreplaceable (though Hitler soon enough had Eva Braun in
tow). But it was a purely selfish dependency on Hitler’s part. Geli
had been allowed to have no existence of her own. Hitler’s own
extreme dependency insisted that she should be totally dependent
upon him. In human terms, it was a self-destructive relationship.
Politically, apart from the short-lived scandal, it was of no
significance. It is difficult to imagine Geli turning Hitler away from
his deeper, less personal, obsession with power. Nor was his
embittered thirst for vengeance and destruction altered by her
death. History would have been no different had Geli Raubal
survived.

Little over a week after Geli’s death, the city elections in the
relatively unresponsive territory of Hamburg gave the Nazis 26.2
per cent of the vote, ahead of the Communists and only fractionally
behind the SPD. With as high a vote as 37.2 per cent in rural
Oldenburg the previous May, the NSDAP had become for the first
time the largest party in a state parliament. The electoral landslide
showed no signs of abating. With the Briining government under
siege, ruling by emergency decree and its policies — calculated to
demonstrate Germany’s inability to pay reparations — sending the
economy plummeting to disaster in a catastrophic downward spiral
of cascading production levels and soaring levels of unemployment
and social misery, more and more voters were cursing the wretched
Republic. By the time of the calamitous bank crash in July, when
two of Germany’s major banks, the Darmstadter and the Dresdner,
collapsed, those voters looking to the survival and recovery of
democracy were in a dwindling minority. But what sort of
authoritarian solution might follow the liquidation of the Weimar
Republic was still anything but clear. Germany’s power élites were
no more united on this issue than were the mass of the population.

With the levels of popular support the Nazis now enjoyed, no
potential right-wing solution could afford to leave them out of the

equation. In July, Hugenberg, the leader of the DNVP, and Franz
Seldte, the head of the huge veterans’ organization, the Stahlhelm,
had renewed their alliance with Hitler — resurrecting the former
grouping to fight the Young Plan — in the ‘National Opposition’.
Hugenberg assuaged the criticisms of Reich President Hindenburg,
who thought the Nazis not only vulgar but dangerous socialists, by
assuring him that he was ‘politically educating’ them towards the
national cause to prevent them slipping into Socialism or
Communism. Hitler’s line was, as ever, pragmatic. The publicity and
contacts won through allying with Hugenberg were valuable. But he
made sure he kept his distance. At the highly publicized rally of
Nationalist Opposition forces at Bad Harzburg on 11 October,
resulting in the creation of the ‘Harzburg Front’ and a manifesto
(which he thought worthless) demanding new Reichstag elections
and the suspension of emergency legislation, Hitler stood for the
march-past of the SA then demonstratively left before the Stahlhelm
could begin, having left them waiting for twenty-five minutes. He
also refused to attend the joint lunch of the nationalist leaders. He
could not suppress his repulsion at such meals, he wrote — deflecting
the criticism of his behaviour into a further advertisement for his
image as a leader who shared the privations of his followers —
‘when thousands of my supporters undertake service only at very
great personal sacrifice and in part with hungry stomachs’. A week
later, to underline the NSDAP’s independent strength, he took the
salute at a march-past of 104,000 SA and SS men in Braunschweig,
the largest Nazi paramilitary demonstration to date.

Among those taking part at Bad Harzburg, and whose presence
there made a stir, was the former President of the Reichsbank
Hjalmar Schacht, now turned political adventurer. Some other
figures — though not prominent ones — from the world of business
were also there. During the 1920s, big business had, not
surprisingly, shown little interest in the NSDAP, a fringe party in
the doldrums without, it seemed, any prospect of power or
influence. The election result of 1930 had compelled the business
community to take note of Hitler’s party. A series of meetings were

arranged at which Hitler explained his aims to prominent
businessmen. The reassurances given by Hitler at such meetings, as
well as by Goring (who had good links to top businessmen), were,
however, not able to dispel the worries of most business leaders
that the NSDAP was a socialist party with radical anti-capitalist
aims.

Despite growing disillusionment with the Briining administration,
most ‘captains of industry’ retained their healthy scepticism about
the Hitler Movement during 1931. There were exceptions, such as
Thyssen, but in general it was the owners of smaller and medium-
sized concerns who found the NSDAP an increasingly attractive
proposition. The leaders of big business were no friends of
democracy. But nor, for the most part, did they want to see the
Nazis running the country.

This remained the case throughout most of 1932, a year
dominated by election campaigns in which the Weimar state
disintegrated into all-embracing crisis. Hitler’s much publicized
address on 27 January 1932 to a gathering of some 650 members of
the Dusseldorf Industry Club in the grand ballroom of Dusseldorf’s
Park Hotel did nothing, despite the later claims of Nazi propaganda,
to alter the sceptical stance of big business. The response to his
speech was mixed. But many were disappointed that he had nothing
new to say, avoiding all detailed economic issues by taking refuge
in his well-trodden political panacea for all ills. And there were
indications that workers in the party were not altogether happy at
their leader fraternizing with industrial leaders. Intensified anti-
capitalist rhetoric, which Hitler was powerless to quell, worried the
business community as much as ever. During the presidential
campaigns of spring 1932, most business leaders stayed firmly
behind Hindenburg, and did not favour Hitler. And during the
Reichstag campaigns of summer and autumn, the business
community overwhelmingly supported the parties that backed the
cabinet of Franz von Papen — a somewhat lightweight, dilettante
politician, but one who epitomized the ingrained conservatism,
reactionary tendencies, and desire for a return to ‘traditional’

authoritarianism of the German upper class. He was the
establishment figure; Hitler the outsider and, in some respects,
unknown quantity. Papen, not Hitler, was, not surprisingly then, the
favourite of big business. Only in autumn 1932, when Papen was
ousted by Kurt von Schleicher, the general at the heart of most
political intrigues, maker and breaker of governments, did the
attitude of most leading figures in business, worried by the new
Chancellor’s approach to the economy and opening to the trades
unions, undergo a significant change.

The NSDAP’s funding continued before the ‘seizure of power’ to
come overwhelmingly from the dues of its own members and the
entrance fees to party meetings. Such financing as came from
fellow-travellers in big business accrued more to the benefit of
individual Nazi leaders than the party as a whole. Goring, needing a
vast income to cater for his outsized appetite for high living and
material luxury, quite especially benefited from such largesse.
Thyssen in particular gave him generous subsidies, which Goring —
given to greeting visitors to his splendrously adorned Berlin
apartment dressed in a red toga and pointed slippers, looking like a
sultan in a harem — found no difficulty in spending on a lavish
lifestyle. Walther Funk, one of Hitler’s links to leading
industrialists, also used his contacts to line his own pockets. Gregor
Strasser, too, was a recipient. Corruption at all levels was endemic.

It would be surprising if none of such donations had reached
Hitler. Indeed, Goring is alleged to have said that he passed on to
Hitler some of the funding he received from Ruhr industrialists.
Hitler had from the earliest years of his ‘career’, as we have seen,
been supported by generous donations from benefactors. But by the
early 1930s he was less dependent on financial support from private
patrons, even if his celebrity status now unquestionably brought
him many unsolicited donations. His sources of income have
remained largely in the dark. They were kept highly secret, and
totally detached from party finances. Schwarz, the party treasurer,
had no insight into Hitler’s own funds. But his taxable income alone
— and much was doubtless left undeclared — trebled in 1930 to

45,472 Marks as sales of Mein Kampf soared following his election
triumph. That alone was more than Funk had earned from a year’s
salary as editor of a Berlin daily. Though for image purposes he
repeatedly emphasized that he drew no salary from the party, nor
any fee for the speeches he delivered on its behalf, he received
hidden fees in the form of lavish ‘expenses’ calculated on the size of
the takings at his meetings. In addition, he was paid handsomely for
the articles he contributed to the Volkischer Beobachter and, between
1928 and 1931, to the Illustrierter Beobachter. And with the foreign
press now clamouring for interviews, another door to a lucrative
source of income opened. Partly subsidized, if indirectly, by the
party, partly drawing substantial royalties from his stated
occupation as a ‘writer’, and partly benefiting from unsolicited
donations from admirers, Hitler’s sources of income were more than
adequate to cover the costs of an affluent lifestyle. His proclaimed
modest demands in matters of food and clothes — a constant element
of his image as a humble man of the people — fell within a context
of chauffeur-driven Mercedes, luxury hotels, grand residences, and a
personal livery of bodyguards and attendants.

During 1932, the terminal nature of Weimar’s ailing democracy
became unmistakable. A prelude to the drama to follow had its
setting in the presidential election in the spring.

Reich President Hindenburg’s seven-year term of office was due
to expire on 5 May 1932. This placed Hitler in a quandary. In the
event of presidential elections, he could scarcely refrain from
standing. Not to stand would be incomprehensible, and a massive
disappointment to his millions of supporters. They might start to
turn away from a leader who shied away from the challenge. On the
other hand, a personal contest between the corporal and the field-
marshal, between the upstart political adventurer and the revered
hero of Tannenberg, widely regarded as the symbol of national
values above the fray of party politics, could hardly be expected to

result in a victory for Hitler. Faced with his dilemma, Hitler
dithered for more than a month before deciding to run for
president.

A technicality had to be cleared up: Hitler was still not a German
citizen. Previous ideas of attaining citizenship for him, in Bavaria in
1929 and Thuringia the following year, had foundered. He remained
‘stateless’. Rapid steps were now taken to appoint Hitler to the post
of Regierungsrat (government councillor) in the Office of State
Culture and Measurement in Braunschweig and as a state
representative in Berlin. Through his nomination as a civil servant,
Hitler acquired German citizenship. On 26 February 1932, he swore
his oath as a civil servant to the German state he was determined to
destroy.

Just how far the political centre of gravity had shifted to the
Right was shown by the perverse alignments in the presidential
election campaign. Hindenburg was dependent for support on the
Socialists and Catholics, who had formed his main opposition seven
years earlier, and made strange and unwelcome bedfellows for the
staunchly Protestant and arch-conservative doyen of the military
caste. The bourgeois Right, headed by Hugenberg, refused
Hindenburg their support. Showing how fragile the professed unity
of the Harzburg Front had been, they also denied it to Hitler. But
their largely unknown nominee, the deputy leader of the Stahlhelm,
Theodor Duesterberg, was hardly a serious candidate. On the Left,
the Communists nominated their leader, Ernst Thalmann, sure of
support only from his own camp. It was plain from the outset,
therefore, that the main contenders were Hindenburg and Hitler.
Equally plain was the Nazi message: a vote for Hitler was a vote for
change; under Hindenburg, things would stay as they were. ‘Old
man ... you must step aside,’ proclaimed Hitler at a rally attended
by an estimated 25,000 in the Berlin Sportpalast on 27 February.

The Nazi propaganda machine went into top gear. The country
was engulfed during the first of five major campaigns that year with
a veritable flood of Nazi meetings, parades, and rallies,
accompanied by the usual pageantry and razzmatazz. Hitler himself,

his indecision resolved, poured all his energies as usual into his
speaking tourneys, travelling the length and breadth of Germany,
and addressing huge crowds in twelve cities during the eleven-day
campaign.

Expectations were built up. But the result was a bitter
disappointment. The 30 per cent won by Hitler was lower than the
NSDAP’s showing in the Oldenburg and Hessen state elections the
previous year. With over 49 per cent of almost 38 million votes
cast, the Reich President ended up a mere 170,000 votes short of
the absolute majority. There had to be a second round.

This time Nazi propaganda had a new gimmick. Hitler took to the
skies in a hired plane, American-style, in his first ‘Germany Flight’
(Deutschlandflug), embellished with the slogan of ‘the Fuhrer over
Germany’. Flying from city to city in a truncated campaign
squeezed into less than a week to accommodate an Easter truce in
politicking, Hitler was able to hold twenty major speeches in
different venues before huge audiences, totalling close to a million
persons. It was a remarkable electioneering performance, the like of
which had never before been seen in Germany. Hindenburg, with 53
per cent, was re-elected. But while Thalmann had slumped to only
10 per cent, Hitler had increased his support to 37 per cent. He had
done much more than merely save face. Well over 13 million, 2
million more than in the first round, had voted for him. The Ftihrer
cult, the manufactured commodity of Nazi propaganda and once the
property of a tiny collection of fanatics, was now on the way to
being sold to a third of the German population.

Quite literally while the votes were being counted, Goebbels was
laying the preparations for the next battle: the series of state
elections on 24 April in Prussia, Bavaria, Wiirttemberg, Anhalt, and
the city elections in Hamburg. All in all, this amounted to about
four-fifths of the country. Without a break, the frenetic campaigning
continued. In his second ‘Germany Flight’ between 16 and 24 April,
Hitler — this time taking his campaign not just to the cities but deep
into the provinces — gave twenty-five big speeches.

The results were closely in line with the votes won by Hitler in
the run-off presidential election. Leader and party were largely
indistinguishable in the eyes of the voters. In the giant state of
Prussia, embracing two-thirds of Reich territory, the NSDAP’s vote
of 36.3 per cent made it easily the largest party, now far ahead of
the SPD which had been the dominant party since 1919. Since the
previous election, in 1928, the Nazis had held six seats in the
Prussian Landtag. Now they had 162 seats. In Bavaria, with 32.5 per
cent, they came to within 0.1 per cent of the ruling BVP. In
Wirttemberg, they rose from 1.8 per cent in 1928, to 26.4 per cent.
In Hamburg, they attained 31.2 per cent. And in Anhalt, with 40.9
per cent, they could nominate the first Nazi Minister President of a
German state.

‘It’s a fantastic victory that we’ve attained,’ noted Goebbels, with
justification. But he added: ‘We must come to power in the
foreseeable future. Otherwise we’ll win ourselves to death in
elections.’ Mobilizing the masses was in itself going to be
insufficient, Goebbels was recognizing. Despite the immense gains
over the previous three years, there were signs that the limits of
mobilization were being reached. The way ahead was still anything
but clear. But another door was about to open.

The state election campaign had been fought in the wake of a ban
on the SA and SS. Chancellor Briining and Interior and Defence
Minister Groener, under pressure from the state authorities, had
persuaded Hindenburg three days after the President’s re-election to
dissolve ‘all military-like organizations’ of the NSDAP. The
dissolution was directly occasioned by the Prussian police’s
discovery, following a tip-off to Reich Minister of the Interior
Groener, in raids on Nazi party offices, shortly after the first round
of the presidential election, of material indicating the SA’s readiness
for a takeover of power by force following an electoral victory by
Hitler. There had been distinct signs during the presidential election

campaigns that the SA — now close to 400,000 strong — was
straining at the leash. Talk of a putsch attempt by the Left in the
event of a Hitler victory was in the air. The SA had been placed on
nationwide alarm. But instead of action, the stormtroopers had sat
depressed in their quarters after Hitler’s defeat. News of the
impending ban leaked to the Nazi leadership two days before it was
imposed. Some preparations could therefore be made to retain the
SA as distinct units within the party organization by simply
reclassing the stormtroopers now as ordinary party members. And
since the Left also had its paramilitary organizations which did not
fall under the Groener dissolution order, the authorities had
delivered the Nazis a further effective propaganda weapon, which
Hitler was quick to exploit.

More importantly, the SA ban opened up the machinations that
were to undermine the position not only of Groener, but of Briining
too, and to move the Reich government sharply to the Right. The
key figure was to be General von Schleicher, head of the Ministerial
Office, the army’s political bureau, in the Reichswehr Ministry, and
seen up to now as Groener’s protégé. Schleicher’s aim was an
authoritarian regime, resting on the Reichswehr, with support from
the National Socialists. The idea was to ‘tame’ Hitler, and
incorporate the ‘valuable elements’ from his Movement into what
would have been essentially a military dictatorship with populist
backing. Schleicher opposed the ban on the SA, therefore, which he
wanted as a feeder organization for an expanded Reichswehr, once
the reparations issue was out of the way. In secret talks with
Schleicher on 28 April, Hitler had learnt that the Reichswehr
leadership no longer supported Briining. He followed this on 7 May
with what Goebbels described as ‘a decisive discussion with General
Schleicher’, attended by some of Hindenburg’s immediate
entourage. ‘Briining is to go in the next days,’ he added. ‘The Reich
President will withdraw his confidence. The plan is to install a
presidential cabinet. The Reichstag will be dissolved; all coercive
laws will be dropped. We will be given freedom of action, and will
then deliver a masterpiece of propaganda.’ Removal of the SA ban

and new elections were, then, Hitler’s price for supporting a new
right-wing cabinet. With the emphasis on elections, it is clear that
Hitler thought, as always, essentially of little more than coming to
power by winning over the masses.

Briining was able to survive longer than the conspirators had
imagined. But his days were plainly numbered. On 29 May,
Hindenburg brusquely sought Brtining’s resignation. The following
day, in the briefest of audiences, it was submitted.

‘The system is collapsing,’ wrote Goebbels. Hitler saw the Reich
President that afternoon. The meeting went well, he told his
propaganda chief in the evening: ‘The SA ban will be dropped.
Uniforms are to be allowed again. The Reichstag will be dissolved.
That’s the most important of all. v.Papen is foreseen as Chancellor.
But that is not so interesting. Voting, voting! Out to the people.
We're all very happy.’

The new Chancellor, Franz von Papen, an urbane and well-
connected member of the Catholic nobility, a former diplomat and
arch-conservative formerly on the right of the Zentrum, had been
sounded out by Schleicher some days before Brtining’s fall.
Schleicher had not only cleared the ground with Hindenburg for
Papen’s appointment, but also drawn up a list of cabinet ministers
and discussed the matter with some of them even before Papen
agreed to serve. With his ‘cabinet of barons’ independent of parties,
Papen made no pretence at parliamentary government. With no
prospect of finding a majority in the Reichstag, he was dependent
solely upon presidential emergency decrees — and the toleration of
the NSDAP.

As prearranged, the Reich President had dissolved the Reichstag,
setting new elections for the latest possible date, 31 July 1932.
Hitler now had his chance to try to win power by the ballot-box.
State elections in Oldenburg at the end of May and in Mecklenburg-
Schwerin on 5 June brought the NSDAP respectively 48.4 and 49.0

per cent of the vote. On 19 June in Hessen the Nazis increased their
proportion of the vote there to 44 per cent. An absolute majority in
the Reichstag election did not seem out of the question.

The second part of Schleicher’s deal with Hitler, the lifting of the
ban on the SA and SS, eventually took place, after some delay, on
16 June. The ban was already by then being openly flouted. Its
lifting ushered in a summer of political violence throughout
Germany such as had never been seen before. The latent civil war
that had existed throughout the Weimar Republic was threatening
to become an actual civil war. Armed clashes and streetfighting
between the SA and the Communists were daily occurrences. Nazi
violence, it might be thought, ought to have put off the ‘respectable’
bourgeois following it was increasingly attracting. But since such
Nazi supporters saw the threat as lying on the Left, the anti-
Communist thuggery purporting to serve the interests of the nation
alienated remarkably few voters.

The level of violence was frightening. In the second half of June,
after the lifting of the SA ban, there were seventeen politically
motivated murders. During July, there were a further eighty-six
killings, mainly Nazis and Communists. The numbers of those
seriously injured rose into the hundreds.

The Papen government immediately took up plans it had
temporarily postponed to depose the Prussian government, still
headed by the Social Democrat Otto Braun with another Socialist,
Carl Severing, as Interior Minister, and placed the largest state in
Germany in the hands of a Reich Commissar. On 20 July,
representatives of the Prussian government were told that they
were deposed, and that Papen was now acting as Reich Commissar
for Prussia. The biggest and most important state, and the vital
bulwark of Social Democracy, capitulated without resistance.
Papen’s destruction of the Prussian bastion without a blow being
raised in anger was undertaken by conservatives, not Nazis. But it
set the model for the takeover of power in the states more than six
months before Hitler became Chancellor.

Meanwhile, Hitler’s party had entered upon its fourth election
campaign within four months. Goebbels had claimed in mid-April
that shortage of money was hindering propaganda. There was little
sign of either money or energy being spared, however, as the
propaganda machine was cranked up once more. A novel touch was
the use of film propaganda and production of 50,000 gramophone
records of an ‘Appeal to the Nation’ by Hitler. There was awareness
that boredom with the constant electioneering was setting in. Hitler
began a speaking marathon in fifty-three towns and cities during his
third ‘Germany Flight’. His theme was unchanged: the parties of the
November Revolution had presided over the untold ruin of every
aspect of German life; his own party was the only one that could
rescue the German people from its misery.

When the results were declared on 31 July, the Nazis could
record another victory — of sorts. They had increased their share of
the vote to 37.4 per cent. This made them, with 230 seats, easily
the largest party in the Reichstag. The Socialists had lost votes,
compared with 1930; the KPD and Zentrum had made slight gains;
the collapse of the bourgeois parties of the centre and right had
advanced still further.

The victory for the Nazis was, however, only a pyrrhic one.
Compared with the Reichstag election results of 1930, let alone
1928, their advance was indeed astonishing. But from a more short-
term perspective the outcome of the July election could even be
regarded as disappointing. They had scarcely improved on the
support they had won in the second presidential election and in the
April state elections.

On 2 August, Hitler was still uncertain what to do. Within two
days, while at Berchtesgaden, he had decided how to play his hand.
He arranged a meeting with Schleicher in Berlin to put his demands:
the Chancellorship for himself, Interior Ministry for Frick, Air
Ministry for Goring, Labour Ministry for Strasser, and a Ministry for
the People’s Education for Goebbels. He was confident that ‘the
barons would give way’. But he left a question mark over the
response of ‘the old man’, Hindenburg.

The secret negotiations with Reichswehr Minister Schleicher, at
Furstenberg, fifty miles north of Berlin, lasted for several hours on
6 August. When Hitler reported back to other Nazi leaders gathered
at Berchtesgaden, he was confident. ‘Within a week the matter will
burst open,’ thought Goebbels. ‘Chief will become Reich Chancellor
and Prussian Minister President, Strasser Reich and Prussian
Interior, Goebbels Prussian and Reich Education, Darré Agriculture
in both, Frick state secretary in the Reich Chancellery, Goring Air
Ministry. Justice [Ministry] stays with us. Warmbold Economy.
Crosigk [i.e. Schwerin von Krosigk] Finance. Schacht Reichsbank. A
cabinet of men. If the Reichstag rejects the enabling act, it will be
sent packing. Hindenburg wants to die with a national cabinet. We
will never give up power again. They’ll have to carry us out as
corpses ... I still can’t believe it. At the gates of power.’

The deal with Schleicher appeared to offer Hitler all he wanted. It
was not total power. But there was little left wanting so far as
internal power and control over domestic politics was concerned.
From Schleicher’s point of view, the concession of a Hitler
Chancellorship was a significant one. But the Reichswehr Minister
presumably reckoned that as long as the army remained under his
own control, Hitler could be kept in check, and would provide the
popular basis for an authoritarian regime in which he himself would
continue to be the éminence grise. The prospect of a civil war, into
which the Reichswehr might be drawn, would recede sharply. And
the teeth of the Nazis would be drawn by the inevitable
compromises they would have to make in the face of the realities of
political responsibility. Such was the thinking behind all variants of
a ‘taming strategy’ which would unfold over the following months.

Nazi supporters scented triumph. The whole party expected
power, it was reported by telephone from Berlin. ‘If things go
badly, there’ll be a dreadful backlash,’ commented Goebbels.

On 11 August, Hitler held a last conference with party leaders at
Prien on the Chiemsee, the biggest of the Bavarian lakes, eighty or
so miles east of Munich, close to the Austrian border. He was by
now aware of the growing opposition in the corridors of power to

his Chancellorship. There was still the possibility of threatening a
coalition with the Zentrum. But Hitler was adamant that nothing
less than the Chancellorship would do. After resting in his flat in
Munich, he travelled next day to Berlin by car to avoid all publicity.
Rohm had meetings with Schleicher and Papen that day, 12 August,
but his soundings about a Hitler Chancellorship were inconclusive.
Hitler arrived in darkness at Goebbels’s house in Caputh, on the
outskirts of Berlin, in the late evening. He was told that matters
were still unresolved after Rohm’s meetings. It was now ‘either-or’,
he insisted. But if it had been as simple as that, he would not have
spent what was left of the evening pacing up and down, pondering
how much hinged on the decision of the Reich President. It was
clear to Goebbels what was at stake. Unless Hitler were to be given
extensive power, meaning the Chancellorship, he would have to
refuse office. In that case, ‘a mighty depression in the movement
and in the electorate would be the consequence’. He added: ‘And we
have only this one iron in the fire.’

The following morning, 13 August, accompanied by Rohm, Hitler
met Schleicher, followed shortly afterwards, this time together with
Frick, by a meeting with Chancellor Papen. He was informed by
both that Hindenburg was not prepared to appoint him Chancellor.
‘I soon realized that I was dealing with a very different man from
the one I had met two months earlier,’ Papen recalled. ‘The modest
air of deference had gone, and I was faced by a demanding
politician who had just won a resounding electoral success.’ Papen
suggested Hitler join the government as Vice-Chancellor. The
alternative of continued opposition, he argued (convinced that
support for the NSDAP had peaked), would surely mean that his
party’s campaign would start to flag. Whereas, in the event of
Hitler’s fruitful cooperation and ‘once the President had got to know
him better’, so Papen later wrote, he would be prepared to resign
the Chancellorship in the Nazi leader’s favour. Hitler rejected point-
blank the notion of the head of such a large movement playing
second fiddle, and was if anything even more dismissive of the idea
that he might consider staying in opposition but allowing one of his

associates to take up the post of Vice-Chancellor. Papen advised him
at the end of the meeting, at times heated, that the decision was the
Reich President’s, but he would have to inform Hindenburg that the
discussions had led to no positive outcome.

Hitler and his entourage, gathered in Goebbels’s house on the
Reichskanzlerplatz, had by now, not surprisingly, become
pessimistic. They could do nothing but wait. When State Secretary
Planck rang from the Reich Chancellery around three o’clock, he
was asked whether there was any point in Hitler seeing the Reich
President, since the decision had evidently been taken. He was told
that Hindenburg wanted first to speak to him. Perhaps there was
still a chance. Hundreds were gathered in Wilhelmstrafse as Hitler
arrived at the Presidential Palace for his audience, set for 4.15 p.m.
Hindenburg was correct, but cool. According to the notes made by
Hindenburg’s State Secretary, Otto Meissner, Hitler was asked
whether he was prepared to serve in Papen’s government. His
cooperation would be welcome, the President stated. Hitler
declared that, for the reasons he had given to the Chancellor in full
that morning, there was no question of his involvement in the
existing government. Given the significance of his movement, he
must demand the leadership of the government and ‘the leadership
of the state to its full extent for himself and his party’. The Reich
President firmly refused. He could not answer, he said, before God,
his conscience and the Fatherland if he handed over the entire
power of the government to a single party, and one which was so
intolerant towards those with different views. He was also worried
about unrest at home and the likely impact abroad. When Hitler
repeated that for him every other solution was ruled out,
Hindenburg advised him then to conduct his opposition in a
gentlemanly fashion, and that all acts of terror would be treated
with utmost severity. In a gesture of pathos more than political
reality, he shook Hitler’s hand as ‘old comrades’. The meeting had
lasted a mere twenty minutes. Hitler had controlled himself. But
outside, in the corridor, he threatened to explode. Events would
inexorably lead to the conclusion he had put forward and to the fall

of the President, he declared. The government would be put in an
extremely difficult position, the opposition would be fierce, and he
would accept no responsibility for the consequences.

Hitler was aware that he had suffered a major political defeat. It
was his greatest setback since the failure of the putsch, nine years
earlier. The strategy he had followed all those years, that
mobilizing the masses — his natural instinct, and what he did best —
would suffice to gain power, had proved a failure. He had taken his
party into a cul-de-sac. The breakthrough had been made. The
NSDAP’s rise to the portals of power had been meteoric. He had just
won a crushing election victory. But he had been flatly rejected as
Reich Chancellor by the one person whose assent, under the Weimar
Constitution, was indispensable: Reich President Hindenburg. The
‘all-or-nothing’ gamble had left Hitler with nothing. With a tired,
depressed, desperately disappointed, and fractious party, the
prospect of continued opposition was not an enticing one. But it was
all that was left. Even given new elections, the chances were that it
would prove difficult to hold on to the level of support already
mobilized.

The 13th of August 1932 ought to have been a defining moment
in Hitler’s bid for power. After that, it should never have come to a
30th of January 1933. Without allies in high places, able eventually
to persuade the Reich President to change his mind, Hitler would
never — even as head of a huge movement, and with over 13 million
supporters in the country — have been able to come to power. That
the Chancellorship was refused Hitler after he had won a victory,
and handed to him after he had suffered a defeat (in the ensuing
Reichstag election in November), was not attributable to any
‘triumph of the will’.

9
Levered into Power

Hitler took the events of 13 August ‘as a personal defeat’. His anger
and humiliation was intensified by the government’s deliberately
brusque communiqué — instigated by Schleicher — on the meeting,
which had briefly emphasized Hindenburg’s rebuff of Hitler’s
demand for total power. Hitler’s pedantically correct, piqued
rejoinder could only claim that he had not demanded ‘total’ power.
At the time, his anger was chiefly directed at Papen. Sent a few days
later to intercede with Hitler, by then staying at Obersalzberg,
Joachim von Ribbentrop — the vain and humourless future Reich
Foreign Minister, on his upward career path not least through his
marriage to the heiress of Germany’s biggest Sekt manufacturers,
Henkel, and a recent recruit to the NSDAP — found him ‘full of
resentment towards Herr von Papen and the entire cabinet in
Berlin’. But if the events of January 1933 were to redeem Papen,
Schleicher would emerge as the central target of Nazi aggression for
his role in the months between August 1932 and January 1933. His
manoeuvrings behind the scenes, particularly his ‘betrayal’ in
August which had led to Hitler’s humiliation, were not forgotten.
He would pay for them with his life.

As usual, Hitler had the capacity to channel disappointment and
depression into outright aggression. Open opposition to the hated
Papen government was now proclaimed. The shadow-boxing of the
summer was over.

Within days, Hitler had an opportunity to turn attention away
from the debacle of his audience with Hindenburg. On 10 August, a
group of SA men had murdered an unemployed labourer and

Communist sympathizer in the Silesian village of Potempa. The
murder was carried out with extraordinary savagery, and in front of
the victim’s mother and brother. As so often, personal and political
motives intermingled. Horrifically brutal though the killing was, it
is an indication of how far public order had collapsed that the event
was in itself little more than a routine act of terror in the awful
summer of 1932, symptomatic of the climate of violence in near-
civil war conditions. No one took particular notice of it at first.
Given a list of three dozen acts of political violence recorded in a
single day and night around the time, the Potempa incident did not
stand out. However, the murder had been committed an hour and a
half after the Papen government’s emergency decree to combat
terrorism had come into effect. This prescribed the death penalty for
premeditated political murder and set up special courts to provide
swift justice for cases arising under the decree. The trial took place
at Beuthen in a tense atmosphere and amid great publicity between
19 and 22 August, ending with the pronouncement of the death
penalty on five of the accused. To inflame feelings in the Nazi camp
still further, two Reichsbanner men were given relatively light
sentences on the very same day for killing two SA men during
disturbances in Ohlau in July. These murders had not been
premeditated, and had taken place before Papen’s emergency
decree. But such differences naturally did not weigh among Hitler’s
supporters. The Potempa murderers were portrayed as martyrs. The
local SA leader, Heines, threatened an uprising if the death
sentences were to be carried out. His rabble-rousing tirade incited
the crowd to break the windows of Jewish-owned shops in Beuthen
and attack the offices of the local SPD newspaper. In this heated
atmosphere, Goodring praised the condemned men and provided
money for their families. Rohm was dispatched to visit them in jail.
On 23 August, Hitler himself sent the telegram that caused a
sensation. ‘My comrades!’ he wrote, ‘in view of this most monstrous
verdict in blood, I feel tied to you in unbounded loyalty. Your
freedom is from this moment on a question of our honour. The
struggle against a government under which this was possible is our
duty!’ The head of Germany’s largest political party was publicly

expressing solidarity with convicted murderers. It was a scandal
Hitler had to take on board. Not to have sympathized with the
Potempa murders would have risked alienating his SA in a
particularly sensitive area, Silesia, and at a time when it was vitally
important to keep the restless stormtroopers on the leash.

The next day, Hitler put out a proclamation castigating the Papen
cabinet, and taking the opportunity to turn the events of 13 August
on their head by claiming his own refusal to participate in a
government capable of such sentences. ‘Those of you who possess a
feel for the struggle for the honour and freedom of the nation will
understand why I refused to enter this bourgeois government,’ he
declared. ‘With this deed, our attitude towards this national cabinet
is prescribed once and for all.’

In the event, Papen, acting in his capacity as Reich Commissar in
Prussia, backed down and had the death sentences for the Potempa
murderers commuted into life imprisonment — a decision which
Papen himself acknowledged was political rather than legal. The
murderers were freed under a Nazi amnesty as early as March 1933.

The Potempa affair had cast glaring light, at precisely the
juncture where the power-brokers were still examining ways and
means of incorporating Hitler in government, on Nazi attitudes
towards the law. But such unmistakable indications of what a Hitler
government would mean for the rule of law in Germany posed no
deterrent to those who still thought the only way out of the crisis
was somehow to involve the Nazis in the responsibility of public
office.

Hitler’s rejection of anything less than the office of Chancellor
had not only created difficulties for the NSDAP. The problems for
the government were now acute. Schleicher had now given up the
idea of a Hitler Chancellorship as long as Hindenburg remained
Reich President. Papen, himself resolutely opposed, took
Hindenburg’s continued opposition for granted. Only two
possibilities, neither attractive, appeared to remain. The first was a
coalition of Zentrum and National Socialists. Feelers were put out
from the Zentrum about such a possibility following the events of

13 August. It never stood much chance of emerging as a solution.
The Zentrum continued to insist that the NSDAP concede the
Chancellorship, but a Hitler Chancellorship had meanwhile become
a ‘question of honour’. Hitler was unwilling now, as he was to be
following the November elections when the possibility was once
more raised, of heading a government dependent upon Reichstag
majorities for support. In any case, the thought of a reversion to
parliamentary government was anathema to Hindenburg and his
advisers.

The second alternative was to persevere with a ‘cabinet of
struggle’ without any hope of support in the Reichstag, where the
Nazis and Communists together prevailed over a ‘negative
majority’. This implied going ahead with plans, first advanced by
Interior Minister Freiherr Wilhelm von Gay] earlier in August, for
dissolving the Reichstag and postponing new elections in order to
provide time to undertake a far-reaching reduction in the powers of
the Reichstag through restricted franchise and a two-chamber
system with a non-elected first chamber. The intention was to end
‘party rule’ once and for all. Necessary for such a drastic step were
the support of the Reich President and the backing of the army to
combat the expected opposition from the Left and possibly also
from National Socialists. This solution for a dissolution of the
Reichstag and postponement — in breach of the Constitution — of
elections beyond the sixty-day limit prescribed, was put to
Hindenburg by Papen at a meeting in Neudeck on 30 August.
Schleicher and Gayl were also present. Hindenburg gave Papen the
dissolution order without ado, and also agreed to the
unconstitutional postponement of new elections on the grounds of a
national state of emergency. Some leading constitutional lawyers —
most prominent among them Carl Schmitt, the renowned
constitutional theorist who in 1933 would place himself at the
service of the Third Reich — were ready with their legal arguments
to back the introduction of an authoritarian state through such a
device.

Probably, if he wanted to risk such a solution, Papen should have
had the new Reichstag dissolved at its very first sitting on 30
August. By 12 September, when the Reichstag met for its second —
and last — sitting, the initiative had been lost. The only item on the
agenda that day was a government declaration on the financial
situation, announcing details of a programme aimed at economic
recovery. A debate was expected to last for several days. However,
the Communist Deputy Ernst Torgler proposed an alteration to the
order of proceedings. He sought first to put a proposal of his party
to repeal the emergency decrees of 4 and 5 September (which had
made deep incisions in the system of tariff wage-bargaining), and to
couple this with a vote of no-confidence in the government. No one
expected much of such a proposal. The amendment to the order of
proceedings would have fallen had there been a single objection.
The Nazis expected the DNVP deputies to object. Astonishingly, not
one did so. In the confusion that followed, Frick obtained an
adjournment of half an hour to seek Hitler’s decision on how to
proceed. Papen, completely taken aback, had to send a messenger
to the Reich Chancellery during the adjournment to pick up the
dissolution order, signed by Hindenburg on 30 August, which he
had not even bothered to bring into the chamber with him.

At a brief meeting with his chief henchmen, Hitler decided that
the opportunity to embarrass the government could not be missed:
the Nazi deputies should immediately support the Communist vote
of no-confidence, thus pre-empting Papen’s dissolution order which
no one doubted he would now put forward. When the Reichstag
reassembled, Papen appeared with the red dispatch box which
traditionally contained the orders of dissolution under his arm.
Amid chaotic scenes, the Reichstag President Goring announced
straight away that he would proceed with the vote on the
Communist proposal. At this, Papen tried to speak. Goring ignored
him, looking intentionally away from the Chancellor to the left side
of the chamber. Papen’s State Secretary Planck pointed out to
Goring that the Chancellor wished to exercise his right to speak.
Gooring retorted simply that the vote had begun. After again trying

vainly to speak, Papen marched over to the Reichstag President’s
platform and slapped the dissolution order down on Goring’s table.
Followed by his cabinet, he then walked out of the chamber to
howls of derision. Goring blithely pushed the dissolution order to
one side, and read out the result of the division. The government
was defeated by 512 votes to 42, with five abstentions and one
invalid ballot paper. Only the DNVP and DVP had supported the
government. All the major parties, including the Zentrum, had
supported the Communist proposal. There had never been a
parliamentary defeat like it. It was received with wild cheering in
the Reichstag.

Goring now read out Papen’s dissolution order, which he declared
invalid since the government had already fallen through a vote of
no-confidence. This was technically incorrect. Goring was
subsequently compelled to concede that the Reichstag had indeed
been formally dissolved by the presentation of Papen’s order. The
no-confidence motion was, therefore, without legal standing. But
this was of purely procedural significance. The government
remained, as a consequence, in office. The reality was, however,
that it had been rejected by more than four-fifths of the people’s
representatives. Papen had been shown in the most humiliating way
possible to be a Chancellor almost devoid of public support. Hitler
was beside himself with joy. The cynical Nazi tactics had meanwhile
given a foretaste of how they would behave in power, given the
opportunity.

New elections — the fifth of the year —- loomed. Papen still had in
his possession Hindenburg’s approval to postpone the election
beyond the sixty days allowed by the constitution. But after the
fiasco of 12 September, the cabinet decided two days later that now
was not the time to proceed with that experiment. The elections
were set for 6 November. The Nazi leadership was aware of the
difficulties. The bourgeois press was now completely hostile. The
NSDAP could make little use of broadcasting. The public were
weary of elections. Even leading party speakers found it difficult to

sustain top form. Not least, noted Goebbels, previous campaigns had
drained all available funds. The party’s coffers were empty.

Electioneering reinvigorated Hitler. And in the fifth long
campaign of the year, he set out yet again to do what he did best:
make speeches. Once more, his indispensability as the chief
propaganda focus of the movement meant he had to embark upon a
punishing schedule of speeches and rallies. During his fourth
‘Germany Flight’ between 11 October and 5 November he gave no
fewer than fifty speeches, again sometimes three a day, on one
occasion four.

His attack now focused squarely on Papen and ‘the Reaction’. The
vast support for his own movement was contrasted with the ‘small
circle of reactionaries’ keeping the Papen government, lacking all
popular backing, in office. The Nazi press inevitably portrayed
Hitler’s campaign as a victory march. But grossly inflated figures for
attendance at Hitler rallies provided in the party press — in rural
areas especially thousands were brought in from outside the area to
swell the numbers — hid the plain signs of disillusionment and
electoral fatigue. Even Hitler was now unable to fill the halls as he
previously had done. For his speech in Nuremberg on 13 October,
the Festhalle in Luitpoldhain was only half full. While a Hitler
speech might have made a difference to the election result in some
places, observers were already predicting in October that his
campaign tour would do little to prevent the expected drop in Nazi
support. The day before the election, Goebbels, too, was
anticipating a defeat.

When the votes were counted, Nazi fears were realized. In the
last election before Hitler came to power (and the last fully free
election in the Weimar Republic) the NSDAP had lost 2 million
voters. In a reduced turn-out — the lowest (at 80.6 per cent) since
1928 — its percentage of the poll had fallen from 37.4 in July to
33.1 per cent, its Reichstag seats reduced from 230 to 196. The SPD
and Zentrum had also lost ground slightly. The winners were the
Communists, who had increased their vote to 16.9 per cent (now
little more than 3 per cent behind the SPD), and the DNVP, which

had risen to 8.9 per cent. The DNVP’s gains had been largely in
winning back former supporters who had drifted to the NSDAP. The
lower turn-out was the other main factor that worked to the
disadvantage of Hitler’s party, as earlier Nazi voters stayed at
home. Not only had the party failed, as before, to make serious
inroads into the big left-wing and Catholic voting blocks; it had this
time lost voters — it seems to all other parties, but predominantly to
the DNVP. The middle classes were beginning to desert the Nazis.

The November election had changed nothing in the political
stalemate — except, perhaps, to make the situation even worse. The
parties supporting the government, the DNVP and DVP, had only
just over 10 per cent of the population behind them. And with the
drop in the vote of both the NSDAP and the Zentrum, a coalition
between the two parties, such as had been discussed in August,
would in itself not suffice to produce an absolute majority in the
Reichstag. The only majority, now as before, was a negative one.
Hitler was undeterred by the election setback. He told party leaders
in Munich to continue the struggle without any relenting. ‘Papen
has to go. There are to be no compromises,’ was how Goebbels
recalled the gist of Hitler’s comments.

Now, as before, Hitler had no interest in power at the behest of
other parties in a majority government dependent on the Reichstag.
By mid-November, Papen’s attempts to find any basis of support for
his government had failed. On 17 November, mourned by few, his
entire cabinet resigned. It was now left to Hindenburg himself to
try to negotiate a path out of the state crisis. Meanwhile, the
cabinet would continue to conduct the daily business of
governmental administration.

On 19 November, the day that Hindenburg received Hitler as part
of his meetings with the heads of the political parties, the Reich
President was handed a petition carrying twenty signatures from
businessmen demanding the appointment of Hitler as Chancellor. It

did not mark proof, as was once thought, of big business support for
Hitler, and its machinations to get him into power. The idea was, in
fact, that of Wilhelm Keppler, emerging as Hitler’s link with a
group of pro-Nazi businessmen, and put into operation in
conjunction with Himmler, who served as the liaison to the Brown
House. Keppler and Schacht began with a list of around three dozen
possible signatories. But they found it an uphill task. Eight of the
‘Keppler Circle’, headed by Schacht and the Cologne banker Kurt
von Schroder, signed the petition. The results with industrialists
were disappointing. A single prominent industrialist, Fritz Thyssen,
signed. But he had for long made no secret of his sympathies for the
National Socialists. The acting President of the Reichslandbund
(Reich Agrarian League), the Nazi-infiltrated lobby of big
landowners, was another signatory. The rest were middle-ranking
businessmen and landholders. It was misleadingly claimed that
leading industrialists Paul Reusch, Fritz Springorum, and Albert
Vogler sympathized, but had withheld their names from the actual
petition. Big business on the whole still placed its hopes in Papen,
though the petition was an indication that the business community
did not speak with a single voice. The agricultural lobby, in
particular, was the one to watch.

In any case, the petition had no bearing on Hindenburg’s
negotiations with Hitler. The Reich President remained, as the
exchanges of mid-November were to show, utterly distrustful of the
Nazi leader. Hitler, for his part, was privately contemptuous of
Hindenburg. But he had no way of attaining power without the
President’s backing.

At his meeting with Hitler on 19 November, Hindenburg
repeated, as in August, that he wanted to see him and his movement
participating in government. The President expressed the hope that
Hitler would take soundings with other parties with a view to
forming a government with a parliamentary majority. This was
calling Hitler’s bluff. Hindenburg knew that it would prove
impossible, given the certain opposition of the DNVP. The outcome

would have been the exposure of Hitler’s failure, and a weakening
of his position. Hitler saw through the tactic straight away.

In what Goebbels called a ‘chessmatch for power’, Hitler replied
that he had no intention of involving himself in negotiations with
other parties before he had been entrusted by the Reich President,
in whose hands the decision lay, with constructing a government. In
such an eventuality, he was confident of finding a basis which
would provide his government with an enabling act, approved by
the Reichstag. He alone was in the position to obtain such a
mandate from the Reichstag. The difficulties would be thereby
solved.

He repeated to Hindenburg in writing two days later his ‘single
request’, that he be given the authority accorded to those before
him. This was precisely what Hindenburg adamantly refused to
concede. He remained unwilling to make Hitler the head of a
presidential cabinet. He left the door open, however, to the
possibility of a cabinet with a working majority, led by Hitler, and
stipulated his conditions for accepting such a cabinet: establishment
of an economic programme, no return to the dualism of Prussia and
the Reich, no limiting of Article 48, and approval of a list of
ministers in which he, the President, would nominate the foreign
and defence ministers. On 30 November Hitler rejected as pointless
a further invitation to discussions with Hindenburg. The deadlock
continued.

Schleicher had been gradually distancing himself from Papen. He
was imperceptibly shifting his role from éminence grise behind the
scenes to main part. Meanwhile, he was making sure that lines were
kept open to Gregor Strasser, who was thought to be ready ‘to step
personally into the breach’ if nothing came of the discussions with
Hitler.

Schleicher threw this possibility into the ring during discussions
between himself, Papen, and Hindenburg on the evening of 1
December. Strasser and one or two of his supporters would be
offered places in the government. About sixty Nazi Reichstag
deputies could be won over. Schleicher was confident of gaining the

support of the trade unions, the SPD, and the bourgeois parties for a
package of economic reforms and work creation. This, he claimed,
would obviate the need for the upturning of the constitution, which
Papen had again proposed. Hindenburg nevertheless sided with
Papen, and asked him to form a government and resume office —
something which had been his intention all along. Behind the
scenes, however, Schleicher had been warning members of Papen’s
cabinet that if there were to be no change of government, and the
proposed breaking of the constitution in a state of emergency were
to take place, there would be civil war and the army would not be
able to cope. This was reinforced at a cabinet meeting the following
morning, 2 December, when Lieutenant-Colonel Ott was brought in
to report on a ‘war games’ exercise which the Reichswehr had
conducted, demonstrating that they could not defend the borders
and withstand the breakdown of internal order which would follow
from strikes and disruption. The army was almost certainly too
pessimistic in its judgement. But the message made its mark on the
cabinet, and on the President. Hindenburg was afraid of possible
civil war. Reluctantly, he let Papen, his favourite, go and appointed
Schleicher as Reich Chancellor.

Ill

In the wake of Schleicher’s overtures to Gregor Strasser, Hitler’s
movement entered upon its greatest crisis since the refoundation of
1925. Strasser was no fringe character. His contribution to the
growth of the NSDAP had been second only to that of Hitler
himself. The organization of the party, in particular, had been
largely his work. His reputation inside the party — though he had
made powerful enemies, not least his one-time acolyte Goebbels —
was high. He was generally seen as Hitler’s right-hand man.
Strasser’s resignation of all his party offices on 8 December 1932
naturally, therefore, caused a sensation. Moreover, it hit a party
already rocked by falling support and shaky morale. If power were

not attained soon, the chances that the party might fall apart
altogether could not be discounted.

Bombshell though Gregor Strasser’s resignation of his party
offices was, trouble had been brewing for some considerable time.
By the autumn of 1932, as Hitler — once seen by sections of business
as a ‘moderate’ — was viewed as an intransigent obstacle to a
conservative-dominated right-wing government, Strasser came to be
seen as a more responsible and constructive politician who could
bring Nazi mass support behind a conservative cabinet. Strasser’s
differences with Hitler were not primarily ideological. He was an
out-and-out racist; he did not shy away from violence; his ‘social
ideas’ were hardly less vague than Hitler’s own; his economic ideas,
eclectic and contradictory, were more utopian than, but still
compatible with, Hitler’s cruder and more brutal notions; his
foreign-policy ambitions were no less extensive than Hitler’s; and he
was ruthless and single-minded in the drive for power. But
tactically, there were fundamental differences. And after 13 August,
as Hitler’s political inflexibility threatened increasingly to block the
road to power forever, these differences came more and more to the
surface. In contrast to Hitler’s ‘all-or-nothing’ stance, Strasser
thought the NSDAP ought to be prepared to join coalitions, explore
all possible alliances, and if necessary enter government even
without the offer of the Chancellorship.

Schleicher was particularly interested in the possibility that
Gregor Strasser could help bring the trade unions behind a ‘national’
— that is, authoritarian - government. Unlike Hitler, whose dislike
of trade unions had never wavered, Strasser was openly conciliatory
towards the unions. Given his growing contacts with union leaders
interested in a broad coalition to head off the dangers they saw on
the far Right and far Left, the prospects of winning their support for
a Schleicher cabinet that had Strasser in the government and offered
an expansive work-creation programme could not be lightly
dismissed.

During the autumn, the rift between Hitler and Strasser widened.
After the November election, Strasser lost his place in Hitler’s inner

circle. In the light of the political sensitivities of the autumn, a
public split in the party leadership was scarcely opportune. But by
the first week of December, matters could rest no longer.

At a meeting held in secret in Berlin on 3 December, Schleicher
offered Strasser the posts of Vice-Chancellor and Minister President
in Prussia. Strasser’s choices were now to back Hitler, to rebel
against him in the hope of winning over some of the party, or to do
what by 8 December he had made up his mind to do: resign his
offices and withdraw from an active role in politics. Strasser must
have realized that the chances of leading a palace revolution against
Hitler were minimal. His best support lay among the Nazi Reichstag
members. But here, too, he controlled nothing amounting to a
firmly organized faction. Pride, as well as his principled objections,
prevented him from backing down and accepting Hitler’s all-or-bust
strategy. He was left, therefore, with only the third possibility.
Perhaps disappointed at the lack of open support from his party
friends, he withdrew to his room in Berlin’s Hotel Exzelsior and
wrote out his letter resigning his party offices.

On the morning of 8 December, he summoned those Regional
Inspectors of the party — the senior Gauleiter - who happened to be
in Berlin to his office in the Reichstag. Six were present besides
Reich Inspector Robert Ley when Strasser addressed them.
According to the post-war account of one of them, Hinrich Lohse,
Strasser told them he had written the Fuhrer a letter, resigning his
party offices. He did not criticize Hitler’s programme, but rather his
lack of any clear policy towards attaining power since the meeting
with Hindenburg in August. Hitler was clear, he said, about one
thing only: he wanted to become Reich Chancellor. But just wanting
the post was not going to overcome the opposition he had
encountered. And meanwhile the party was under great strain and
exposed to potential disintegration. Strasser said he was prepared to
go along with either the legal or the illegal — that is, putschist - way
to power. But what he was not prepared to do was simply wait for
Hitler to be made Reich Chancellor and see the party fall apart
before that happened. Hitler, in his view, should have accepted the

Vice-Chancellorship in August, and used that position as a
bargaining counter to build up further power. On a personal note,
Strasser expressed his pique at being excluded from top-level
deliberations, and had no wish to play second fiddle to Goring,
Goebbels, Rohm, and others. Now at the end of his tether, he was
resigning his offices and leaving to recuperate.

Strasser’s letter was delivered to Hitler in the Kaiserhof at
midday on 8 December. It amounted to a feeble justification of
Strasser’s position, couched in terms of wounded pride, and not
touching on the fundamentals that separated him from Hitler. It had
the ring of defeat in the very way it was formulated. Hitler had
been forewarned by Gauleiter Bernhard Rust, who had attended the
meeting called by Strasser, to expect the letter. He had immediately
summoned the same group of party Inspectors whom Strasser had
addressed to the Kaiserhof for a meeting at noon. The group, in
dejected mood, were left standing in Hitler’s apartment while, in an
agitated state, he provided a point-by-point counter to Strasser’s
reasons for his resignation, as summarized by Robert Ley from the
earlier meeting. Entering the Papen cabinet, he said, would have
given the initiative to the party’s enemies. He would soon have
been forced, through fundamental disagreement with Papen’s
policies, into resignation. The effect on public opinion would have
been the apparent demonstration of his incapacity for government —
that which his enemies had always claimed. The electorate would
have turned their backs on him. The movement would have
collapsed. The illegal route was even more dangerous. It would
simply have meant — the lessons of 1923 plainly recalled — standing
‘the prime of the nation’s manhood’ in front of the machine-guns of
the police and army. As for overlooking Strasser, Hitler
disingenuously claimed he entered into discussions with
whomsoever was necessary for a particular purpose, distributed
tasks according to specific circumstances, and — according to
availability — was open to all. He shifted the blame back on Gregor
Strasser for avoiding him. His address went on for the best part of
two hours. Towards the end, the well-worn tactic was deployed

once more: he made a personal appeal to loyalty. According to
Lohse’s account, he became ‘quieter and more human, more friendly
and appealing in his comments’. He had found ‘that comradely tone
which those assembled knew and which completely convinced them
... Increasingly persuasive to his audience and inexorably drawing
them under his spell, he [Hitler] triumphed and proved to his
wavering, but upright and indispensable fighters in this toughest
test of the movement, that he was the master and Strasser the
journeyman ... The old bond with him was again sealed by those
present with a handshake.’

The mood that evening at Goebbels’s house, where Hitler
returned, was nevertheless still sombre. There was real concern that
the movement would fall apart. If that were to happen, announced
Hitler, ‘I'll finish things in three minutes.’ Dramatic gestures soon
gave way to concerted moves to counter the possible ramifications
of the ‘treachery’. Goebbels was summoned the same night at 2 a.m.
to a meeting in the Kaiserhof, where he found Rohm and Himmler
already with Hitler. Hitler, still stunned by Strasser’s action, spent
the time pacing the floor of his hotel room. The meeting lasted until
dawn. The main outcome was the decision to dismantle the
organizational framework that Strasser had erected, and which had
given him his power-base in the party. In time-honoured fashion, as
he had taken over the SA leadership following the Stennes affair,
Hitler himself now formally took over the leadership of the political
organization, with Robert Ley as his chief of staff. A new Political
Central Commission was set up, under Rudolf HefS, and the two
Reich Inspectorates created by Strasser were abolished. A number of
known Strasser supporters were removed from their posts. And a
major campaign was begun, eliciting countless declarations of
loyalty to Hitler from all parts of Germany — also from Strasser
sympathizers. Strasser was rapidly turned into the movement’s arch-
traitor. Hitler began the appeals to loyalty the very next day, 9
December, when he addressed the Gauleiter, Regional Inspectors,
and Reichstag deputies. According to the report in the Volkischer
Beobachter, every single person present felt the need to offer a

personal show of loyalty by shaking hands with the Fuhrer. ‘Strasser
is isolated. Dead man!’ noted Goebbels triumphantly. Soon
afterwards, Hitler set off on a speaking tour, addressing party
members and functionaries at seven meetings in nine days. Again
and again the personal appeal was successful. No secession followed
Strasser’s resignation. The crisis was past.

Strasser now retired fully from all political activity and from
public view. He was not excluded from the party. In fact, early in
1934 he applied for, and was granted, the NSDAP’s badge of
honour, awarded to him as party member No.9, dating from the
refoundation of the party on 25 February 1925. Neither this nor a
plaintive letter he wrote to Rudolf Hef§ on 18 June 1934
emphasizing his lengthy service and continuing loyalty to the party
could save his skin. Hitler was unforgiving to those he felt had
betrayed him. His final reckoning with Gregor Strasser came on 30
June 1934, when the former second man in the party was murdered
in what came to be known as ‘the Night of the Long Knives’.

Ultimately, the Strasser affair — the most serious of the inner-
party crises since 1925 — revealed once again most graphically just
how strong Hitler’s hold over the party had become, how much the
NSDAP had become a ‘leader party’.

The events of January 1933 amounted to an extraordinary political
drama. It was a drama that unfolded largely out of sight of the
German people.

A fortnight after Schleicher had taken over from him as Reich
Chancellor, Franz von Papen had been guest of honour at a dinner
at the Berlin Herrenklub. Among the 300 or so guests listening to
his speech on 16 December, justifying his own record in
government, criticizing the Schleicher cabinet, and indicating that
he thought the NSDAP should be included in government, was the
Cologne banker Baron Kurt von Schroder. A few weeks earlier,
Schroder had been a signatory to the petition to Hindenburg to

make Hitler Chancellor. For months before that, he had been a Nazi
sympathizer, and was a member of the ‘Keppler Circle’ — the group
of economic advisers that Wilhelm Keppler, a one-time small
businessman, had set up on Hitler’s behalf. Already in November -—
though nothing came of it at the time — Keppler had told Schroder
that Papen might be prepared to intercede with Hindenburg in
favour of a Hitler Chancellorship. Now, after Papen’s Herrenklub
speech, interested by what the former Chancellor had had to say,
Schroder met him for a few minutes late in the evening to discuss
the political situation. The two had known each other for some
time. And since Schroder also knew Hitler, he was the ideal
intermediary at a time that relations between the Nazi leader and
the former Chancellor were still icy. Out of the discussion came the
suggestion of a meeting between Hitler and Papen. The meeting
was fixed to take place at Schroder’s house in Cologne on 4 January
1933.

Papen arrived around midday. He found Hitler —- who had entered
through the back door - together with Hefg, Himmler, and Keppler,
waiting for him. Hitler, Papen, and Schroder adjourned to another
room, while the others waited. Schroder took no part in the
discussions. Most likely, the question of who was to lead the new
government was left open at the meeting. Papen spoke loosely of
some sort of duumvirate, and left open the possibility of ministerial
posts, even if Hitler himself did not feel ready to take office, for
some of his colleagues. After about two hours, discussions ended for
lunch with the agreement to deal with further issues at a subsequent
meeting, in Berlin or elsewhere. Papen evidently felt progress had
been made. In a private audience with the Reich President a few
days later, Papen informed Hindenburg that Hitler had lessened his
demands and would be prepared to take part in a coalition
government with parties of the Right. The unspoken assumption
was that Papen would lead such a government. The Reich President
told Papen to keep in touch with the Nazi leader.

A second meeting between Hitler and Papen soon followed. It
took place this time in the study of Ribbentrop’s house in Dahlem, a

plush residential suburb of Berlin, on the night of 10-11 January.
Nothing came of it, since Papen told Hitler that Hindenburg still
opposed his appointment to the Chancellorship. Hitler angrily broke
off further talks until after the Lippe election.

Elections in the mini-state of Lippe-Detmold, with its 173,000
inhabitants, would at other times scarcely have been a first priority
for Hitler and his party. But now, they were a chance to prove the
NSDAP was again on the forward march after its losses the previous
November and after the Strasser crisis. Despite the poor state of the
party’s finances, no effort was spared towards obtaining a good
result in Lippe. For close on a fortnight before the election, on 15
January, Lippe was saturated with Nazi propaganda. All the Nazi
big guns were fired. Goring, Goebbels and Frick spoke. Hitler
himself gave seventeen speeches in eleven days. It paid off. The
NSDAP won almost 6,000 more votes compared with the November
result, and increased its share of the poll from 34.7 to 39.5 per cent.
The bandwagon seemed to be rolling again.

Hitler’s position was strengthened, however, less by the Lippe
result than by Schleicher’s increasing isolation. Not only had his
lingering hopes of Gregor Strasser and gaining support from the
Nazi ranks practically evaporated by mid-January. The
Reichslandbund had by then declared open warfare on his
government because of its unwillingness to impose high import
levies on agricultural produce. Schleicher was powerless to do
anything about such opposition, which had backing not only within
the DNVP but also within the NSDAP. Accommodation with the big
agrarians would axiomatically have meant opposition from both
sides of industry, bosses and unions, as well as consumers.
Hugenberg’s offers to bring the DNVP behind Schleicher if he were
to be given the combined ministries of Economics and Food were
therefore bound to fall on deaf ears. Correspondingly, by 21
January, the DNVP had also declared its outright opposition to the
Chancellor. Shrill accusations, along with those of the agrarians, of
the government’s ‘Bolshevism’ in the countryside because of its
schemes to divide up bankrupt eastern estates to make

smallholdings for the unemployed were a reminder of the lobbying
which had helped bring down Britining. Schleicher’s position was
also weakened by the Osthilfe (Eastern Aid) scandal that broke in
mid-January. The agrarian lobby was incensed that the government
had not hushed up the affair. Since some of Hindenburg’s close
friends and fellow landowners were implicated, the ire directed at
Schleicher could be transmitted directly through the Reich
President. And when, in the wake of the scandal, it was revealed
that the President’s own property at Neudeck, presented to him by
German business five years earlier, had been registered in his son’s
name to avoid death-duties, Schleicher was held responsible by
Hindenburg for allowing his name to be dragged through the mud.
Meanwhile, serving as the go-between, Ribbentrop had arranged
another meeting between Hitler and Papen on 18 January.
Accompanied by Rohm and Himmler, Hitler - encouraged by the
Lippe success and by Schleicher’s mounting difficulties - now
hardened his position from the earlier meetings in the month and
expressly demanded the Chancellorship. When Papen demurred,
claiming his influence with Hindenburg was not sufficient to bring
this about, Hitler, in his usual way, told the former Chancellor he
saw no point in further talks. Ribbentrop then suggested that it
might be worth talking to Hindenburg’s son, Oskar. The following
day, Ribbentrop took his suggestion further with Papen. The result
was a meeting, arranged for late on the Sunday evening, 22
January, at Ribbentrop’s house, at which Oskar von Hindenburg and
the Reich President’s State Secretary Otto Meissner agreed to be
present. Frick accompanied Hitler. Goring joined them later. The
main part of the meeting consisted of a two-hour discussion
between Hitler and the President’s son. Hitler also spoke with
Papen, who told him that the President had not changed his mind
about making him Chancellor, but recognized that the situation had
changed and that it was necessary to incorporate the National
Socialists in this or a new government. Hitler was unyielding. He
made it plain that Nazi cooperation could only come under his
Chancellorship. Apart from the Chancellorship for himself, he

insisted only upon the Reich Ministry of the Interior for Frick and a
further cabinet post for Goring. These claims were more modest —
and were recognized as being such — than those he had put forward
to Schleicher the previous August. Papen demanded the post of
Vice-Chancellor for himself. On that basis, he now agreed to press
for Hitler to become Chancellor — a notable breakthrough — but
promised to withdraw if there was any sign that he did not have
Hitler’s confidence.

The following day, Chancellor Schleicher, by now aware of the
threat to his position, informed the Reich President that a vote of
no-confidence in the government could be expected at the delayed
recall of the Reichstag on 31 January. He requested an order of
dissolution and postponement of new elections. Hindenburg agreed
to consider a dissolution, but rejected the breach of Article 25 of the
Weimar Constitution which an indefinite postponement would have
entailed. What he had been prepared to grant Papen five months
earlier, he now refused Schleicher.

At the same time, Hindenburg had left himself with little room
for manoeuvre. He had once more rejected the idea of a Hitler
Chancellorship. That left only the return to a Papen cabinet —
Hindenburg’s favoured outcome, but scarcely likely to resolve the
crisis, and regarded with scepticism even by Papen himself. As
rumours hared round Berlin, the prospect of a reversion to Papen’s
‘cabinet of struggle’, with a major role for Hugenberg, and a
declaration of a state of emergency was, remarkable though it now
seems, seen as more worrying than a cabinet led by Hitler. Fears of
such an eventuality were sharply intensified after Schleicher, on 28
January, having been refused the dissolution order by the Reich
President, submitted his own resignation and that of his entire
cabinet. Within hours, Hindenburg asked Papen to try to work
towards a solution within the framework of the Constitution and
with the backing of the Reichstag. According to Papen’s own
account, he was asked by the President to take soundings about the
possibilities of a Hitler cabinet. Papen told Ribbentrop that Hitler
must be contacted without delay. A turning-point had been reached.

After his talk with Hindenburg, he now thought a Hitler
Chancellorship a possibility.

By this time, Papen had come round to full acceptance of a
government led by Hitler. The only question in his mind was to
ensure that Hitler was firmly contained by ‘reliable’ and
‘responsible’ conservatives. Following the resignation of the
Schleicher cabinet on 28 January, Papen had meetings with
Hugenberg and Hitler. Hugenberg agreed that a Hitler cabinet was
the only way forward, but stressed the importance of limiting his
power. He demanded for himself the Reich and Prussian Ministries
of Economics as the price of the DNVP’s support. Hitler,
unsurprisingly, refused — as he had done since August — to entertain
the notion of a government dependent on a parliamentary majority,
and held out for the headship of a presidential cabinet with the
same rights that had been granted to Papen and Schleicher. He
reiterated his readiness to include those from previous cabinets
whom the President favoured, as long as he could be Chancellor and
Commissioner for Prussia, and could place members of his own
party in the Ministries of the Interior in the Reich and Prussia. The
demands for extensive powers in Prussia caused problems.
Ribbentrop and Goring tried to persuade Hitler to settle for less.
Eventually, ‘with a bad grace’, as Papen put it, he accepted that the
powers of Reich Commissar for Prussia would remain with Papen,
in his capacity as Vice-Chancellor.

Meanwhile, Papen had taken soundings by telephone from
several former cabinet members, conservatives held in esteem by
Hindenburg. All replied that they would be prepared to work ina
Hitler cabinet, with Papen as Vice-Chancellor, but not in a Papen—
Hugenberg ‘cabinet of struggle’. This impressed Hindenburg, when
Papen reported to him late on the night of 28 January. He was also
gratified by the ‘moderation’ of Hitler’s demands. For the first time,
the Reich President was now amenable to a Hitler cabinet. The
deadlock was broken.

Hindenburg and Papen discussed the composition of the cabinet.
The President was glad that the trusted Konstantin Freiherr von

Neurath would remain at the Foreign Ministry. He wanted someone
equally sound at the Defence Ministry, following Schleicher’s
departure. His own suggestion was General von Blomberg, the army
commander in East Prussia and currently technical adviser of the
German delegation to the Disarmament Conference in Geneva.
Hindenburg thought him extremely reliable and ‘completely
apolitical’. The following morning he was ordered back to Berlin.

Papen continued his power-brokerage on the morning of 29
January in discussions with Hitler and Goring. The composition of
the cabinet was agreed. All posts but two (other than the
Chancellorship) were to be occupied by conservatives, not Nazis.
Neurath (Foreign Minister), Schwerin von Krosigk (Finance), and
Eltz-Rubenach (Post and Transport Ministry) had been members of
the Schleicher cabinet. The occupancy of the Justice Ministry was
left open for the time being. Frick was nominated by Hitler as Reich
Minister of the Interior. Compensation for the concession made over
the position of Reich Commissar of Prussia was the acceptance by
Papen that Goring would serve nominally as Papen’s deputy in the
Prussian Ministry of the Interior. This key appointment effectively
gave the Nazis control over the police in the giant state of Prussia,
embracing two-thirds of the territory of the Reich. There was no
place as yet for Goebbels in a propaganda ministry, part of Nazi
expectations the previous summer. But Hitler assured Goebbels that
his ministry was waiting for him. It was simply a matter of
necessary tactics for a temporary solution. Apart from all else,
Hitler needed Goebbels for the election campaign he was insisting
must follow his appointment as Chancellor.

Papen had talks the same day with Hugenberg and with the
Stahlhelm leaders Seldte and Duesterberg. Hugenberg still objected
to the Nazi demands for new elections, from which his own party
had nothing to gain. But, tempted by the offer of the powerful
Economics Ministry, which he had long coveted, he tentatively
offered his cooperation. When, in late January, the deputy
Stahlhelm leader Theodor Duesterberg warned him of the
consequences of entrusting the Chancellorship to someone as

dishonest as Hitler, Hugenberg waved the objections aside. Nothing
could happen. Hindenburg would remain Reich President and
supreme commander of the armed forces; Papen would be Vice-
Chancellor; he himself would have control of the entire economic
sphere, including agriculture; Seldte (the Stahlhelm leader) would
be in charge of the Labour Ministry. ‘We’re boxing Hitler in,’
concluded Hugenberg. Duesterberg replied darkly that Hugenberg
would find himself one night fleeing through ministerial gardens in
his underpants to avoid arrest.

Some of Papen’s conservative friends also expressed their deep
concern at the prospect of a Hitler cabinet. Papen told them there
was no alternative within the framework of the Constitution. To
one who warned him that he was placing himself in Hitler’s hands,
Papen replied: ‘You are mistaken. We’ve hired him.’

A last problem still had to be resolved. Hitler insisted at his
meeting with Papen on new elections to be followed by an enabling
act. For Hitler, this was crucial. An enabling act was vital to be able
to rule without dependency on either the Reichstag or on
presidential backing for emergency decrees. But the current
composition of the Reichstag offered no hope of passing an enabling
act. Papen reported back, via Ribbentrop, that Hindenburg was not
in favour of new elections. Hitler told Ribbentrop to inform the
President that there would be no further elections after these. By
the afternoon of 29 January, Papen was able to tell Goring and
Ribbentrop that all was clear. ‘Everything perfect,’ Goring reported
back to the Kaiserhof. Hitler was expected by the Reich President at
eleven o’clock the next morning to be sworn in as Chancellor.

Just before the new cabinet entered the Reich President’s
chambers, it was finally agreed that they would seek the dissolution
order that Hitler so badly wanted. At last, shortly after noon, the
members of the Hitler cabinet trooped into the Reich President’s
rooms. Hindenburg gave a brief welcoming address, expressing
satisfaction that the nationalist Right had finally come together.
Papen then made the formal introductions. Hindenburg nodded his
approval as Hitler solemnly swore to carry out his obligations

without party interests and for the good of the whole nation. He
again approvingly acknowledged the sentiments expressed by the
new Reich Chancellor who, unexpectedly, made a short speech
emphasizing his efforts to uphold the Constitution, respect the rights
of the President, and, after the next election, to return to normal
parliamentary rule. Hitler and his ministers awaited a reply from
the Reich President. It came, but in only a single sentence: ‘And
now, gentlemen, forwards with God.’

‘Hitler is Reich Chancellor. Just like a fairy-tale,’ noted Goebbels.
Indeed, the extraordinary had happened. What few beyond the
ranks of Nazi fanatics had thought possible less than a year earlier
had become reality. Against all odds, Hitler’s aggressive obstinacy —
born out of lack of alternatives — had paid off. What he had been
unable to achieve himself, his ‘friends’ in high places had achieved
for him. The ‘nobody of Vienna’, ‘unknown soldier’, beerhall
demagogue, head of what was for years no more than a party on
the lunatic fringe of politics, a man with no credentials for running
a sophisticated state-machine, practically his sole qualification the
ability to muster the support of the nationalist masses whose base
instincts he showed an unusual talent for rousing, had now been
placed in charge of government of one of the leading states in
Europe. His intentions had scarcely been kept secret over the years.
Whatever the avowals of following a legal path to power, heads
would roll, he had said. Marxism would be eradicated, he had said.
Jews would be ‘removed’, he had said. Germany would rebuild the
strength of its armed forces, destroy the shackles of Versailles,
conquer ‘by the sword’ the land it needed for its ‘living space’, he
had said. A few took him at his word, and thought he was
dangerous. But far, far more, from Right to Left of the political
spectrum — conservatives, liberals, socialists, communists —
underrated his intentions and unscrupulous power instincts at the
same time as they scorned his abilities. The Left’s underestimation

was at least not responsible for getting him into power. Socialists,
communists, trade unions were all little more than by-standers,
their scope for influencing events emasculated since 1930. It was
the blindness of the conservative Right to the dangers which had
been so evident, arising from their determination to eliminate
democracy and destroy socialism and the consequent governmental
stalemate they had allowed to develop, that delivered the power of
a nation-state containing all the pent-up aggression of a wounded
giant into the hands of the dangerous leader of a political gangster-
mob.

There was no inevitability about Hitler’s accession to power. Had
Hindenburg been prepared to grant to Schleicher the dissolution
that he had so readily allowed Papen, and to prorogue the Reichstag
for a period beyond the constitutional sixty days, a Hitler
Chancellorship might have been avoided. With the corner turning of
the economic Depression, and with the Nazi movement facing
potential break-up if power were not soon attained, the future —
even if under an authoritarian government — would have been very
different. Hitler’s rise from humble beginnings to ‘seize’ power by
‘triumph of the will’ was the stuff of Nazi legend. In fact, political
miscalculation by those with regular access to the corridors of
power rather than any actions on the part of the Nazi leader played
a larger role in placing him in the Chancellor’s seat.

His path ought to have been blocked long before the final drama
of January 1933. The most glaring opportunity was missed through
the failure to impose a hefty jail sentence after the putsch fiasco of
1923 — and to compound this disastrous omission by releasing him
on parole within a matter of months and allowing him a fresh start.
But those miscalculations, as well as those during the Depression
years that opened up the possibility, then the reality, of a Hitler
Chancellorship, were not random acts. They were the
miscalculations of a political class determined to inflict what injury
it could on (or at least make only the faintest attempts to defend)
the new, detested, or at best merely tolerated democratic Republic.
The anxiety to destroy democracy rather than the keenness to bring

the Nazis to power was what triggered the complex developments
that led to Hitler’s Chancellorship.

Democracy was surrendered without a fight. This was most
notably the case in the collapse of the grand coalition in 1930. It
was again the case — however vain the opposition might have
proved — in the lack of resistance to the Papen coup against Prussia
in July 1932. Both events revealed the flimsiness of democracy’s
base. This was not least because powerful groups had never
reconciled themselves to democracy, and were by this time actively
seeking to bring it down. During the Depression, democracy was
less surrendered than deliberately undermined by élite groups
serving their own ends. These were no pre-industrial leftovers, but —
however reactionary their political aims — modern lobbies working
to further their vested interests in an authoritarian system. In the
final drama, the agrarians and the army were more influential than
big business in engineering Hitler’s takeover. But big business, also,
politically myopic and self-serving, had significantly contributed to
the undermining of democracy which was the necessary prelude to
Hitler’s success.

The masses, too, had played their part in democracy’s downfall.
Never had circumstances been less propitious for the establishment
of successful democracy than they were in Germany after the First
World War. Already by 1920, the parties most supportive of
democracy held only a minority of the vote. Democracy narrowly
survived its early travails, though great swathes of the electorate
opposed it root and branch. Who is to say that, had not the great
Depression blown it completely off course, democracy might not
have settled down and consolidated itself? But democracy was in a
far from healthy state when the Depression struck Germany. And in
the course of the Depression, the masses deserted democracy in
their droves. By 1932, the only supporters of democracy were the
weakened Social Democrats (and even many of these were by this
time lukewarm), some sections of the Zentrum (which had itself
moved sharply to the Right), and a handful of liberals. The Republic

was dead. Still open was what sort of authoritarian system would
replace it.

The ruling groups did not have the mass support to maximize
their ascendancy and destroy once and for all the power of
organized labour. Hitler was brought in to do the job for them. That
he might do more than this, that he might outlast all predictions and
expand his own power immensely and at their own expense, either
did not occur to them, or was regarded as an exceedingly unlikely
outcome. The underestimation of Hitler and his movement by the
power-brokers remains a leitmotiv of the intrigues that placed him
in the Chancellor’s office.

The mentalities which conditioned the behaviour both of the
élites and of the masses, and which made Hitler’s rise possible, were
products of strands of German political culture that were plainly
recognizable in the twenty years or so before the First World War.
Even so, Hitler was no inexorable product of a German ‘special
path’, no logical culmination of long-term trends in specifically
German culture and ideology.

Nor was he a mere ‘accident’ in the course of German history.
Without the unique conditions in which he came to prominence,
Hitler would have been nothing. It is hard to imagine him
bestriding the stage of history at any other time. His style, his brand
of rhetoric, would, deprived of such conditions, have been without
appeal. The impact on the German people of war, revolution, and
national humiliation, and the acute fear of Bolshevism in wide
sections of the population gave Hitler his platform. He exploited the
conditions brilliantly. More than any other politician of his era, he
was the spokesman for the unusually intense fears, resentments, and
prejudices of ordinary people not attracted by the parties of the Left
or anchored in the parties of political Catholicism. And more than
any other politician of his era, he offered such people the prospect
of a new and better society — though one seeming to rest on ‘true’
German values with which they could identify. The vision of the
future went hand in hand with the denunciation of the past in
Hitler’s appeal. The total collapse of confidence in a state system

resting on discredited party politics and bureaucratic administration
had led over a third of the population to place its trust and its hopes
in the politics of national redemption. The personality cult carefully
nurtured around Hitler turned him into the embodiment of such
hopes.

Whatever the future held, for those who could not share the
delirium of the SA hordes marching through the Brandenburg Gate
in celebration on the evening of 30 January 1933, it was at best
uncertain. ‘A leap into the dark’ was how one Catholic newspaper
described Hitler’s appointment to the Chancellorship.

Many Jews and political opponents of the Nazis now feared for
their well-being — even for their lives. Some made hurried plans to
leave the country. There were those, not just on the defeated Left,
who foresaw disaster. But others rapidly shook off their initial
foreboding, convincing themselves that Hitler and the Nazis had few
prospects of ruling for long. Sebastian Haffner, then a young Berlin
lawyer, later — after leaving a country whose government he could
no longer tolerate — a distinguished journalist and writer,
summarized his views at the time: ‘No. All things considered, this
government was no cause for concern. It was only a matter of what
would come after it, and perhaps the fear that it would lead to civil
war.’ Most of the serious press, he added, took the same line next
day.

Few, indeed, predicted that things would turn out so differently.

10
The Making of the Dictator

Hitler is Reich Chancellor! And what a cabinet!!! One such as we did not dare to dream of
in July. Hitler, Hugenberg, Seldte, Papen!!! A large part of my German hopes are attached to
each. National Socialist drive, German National reason, the non-political Stahlhelm, and —
not forgotten by us — Papen. It is so unimaginably wonderful ... What an achievement by
Hindenburg!

This was the ecstatic response of Hamburg schoolteacher Louise
Solmitz to the dramatic news of Hitler’s appointment to the
Chancellorship on 30 January 1933. Like so many who had found
their way to Hitler from middle-class, national-conservative
backgrounds, she had wavered the previous autumn when she
thought he was slipping under the influence of radical socialist
tendencies in the party. Now that Hitler was in office, but
surrounded by her trusted champions of the conservative Right,
heading a government of ‘national concentration’, her joy was
unbounded. The national renewal she longed for could now begin.
Many, outside the ranks of diehard Nazi followers, their hopes and
ideals invested in the Hitler cabinet, felt the same way.

But millions did not. Fear, anxiety, alarm, implacable hostility,
illusory optimism at the regime’s early demise, and bold defiance
intermingled with apathy, scepticism, condescension towards the
presumed inability of the new Chancellor and his Nazi colleagues in
the cabinet — and indifference.

Reactions varied according to political views and personal
disposition. Alongside misplaced hopes on the Left in the strength
and unity of the labour movement went the crass misapprehension
of Hitler as no more than the stooge of the ‘real’ wielders of power,

the forces of big capital, as represented by their friends in the
cabinet. Influenced by years of warnings from their clergy, the
Catholic population were apprehensive and uncertain. Among many
Protestant churchgoers there was optimism that national renewal
would bring with it inner, moral revitalization. Many ordinary
people, after what they had gone through in the Depression, were
simply apathetic at the news that Hitler was Chancellor. Those in
provincial Germany who were not Nazi fanatics or committed
opponents often shrugged their shoulders and carried on with life,
doubtful that yet another change of government would bring any
improvement. Some thought that Hitler would not even be as long
in office as Schleicher, and that his popularity would slump as soon
as disillusionment set in on account of the emptiness of Nazi
promises. But perceptive critics of Hitler were able to see that, now
he enjoyed the prestige of the Chancellorship, he could swifly break
down much of the scepticism and win great support by successfully
tackling mass unemployment — something which none of his
successors had come close to achieving.

For the Nazis themselves, of course, 30 January 1933 was the day
they had dreamed about, the triumph they had fought for, the
opening of the portals to the brave new world — and the start of
what many hoped would be opportunities for prosperity,
advancement, and power. Wildly cheering crowds accompanied
Hitler on his way back to the Kaiserhof after his appointment with
Hindenburg. By seven o’clock that evening Goebbels had
improvised a torchlight procession of marching SA and SS men
through the centre of Berlin that lasted beyond midnight. He wasted
no time in exploiting the newly available facilities of state radio to
provide a stirring commentary. He claimed a million men had taken
part. The Nazi press halved the number. The British Ambassador
estimated a maximum figure of some 50,000. His military attaché
thought there were around 15,000. Whatever the numbers, the
spectacle was an unforgettable one — exhilarating and intoxicating
for Nazi followers, menacing for those at home and abroad who
feared the consequences of Hitler in power.

Power had not been ‘seized’, as Nazi mythology claimed. It had
been handed to Hitler, who had been appointed Chancellor by the
Reich President in the same manner as had his immediate
predecessors. Even so, the orchestrated ovations, which put Hitler
himself and other party bosses into a state of ecstasy, signalled that
this was no ordinary transfer of power. And almost overnight, those
who had misunderstood or misinterpreted the momentous nature of
the day’s events would realize how wrong they had been. After 30
January 1933, Germany would never be the same again.

That historic day was an end and a beginning. It denoted the
expiry of the unlamented Weimar Republic and the culminating
point of the comprehensive state crisis that had brought its demise.
At the same time Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor marked the
beginning of the process which was to lead into the abyss of war
and genocide, and bring about Germany’s own destruction as a
nation-state. It signified the start of that astonishingly swift
jettisoning of constraints on inhumane behaviour whose path ended
in Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek, and the other death
camps whose names are synonymous with the horror of Nazism.

Remarkable in the seismic upheavals of 1933-4 was not how
much, but how little, the new Chancellor needed to do to bring
about the extension and consolidation of his power. Hitler’s
dictatorship was made as much by others as by himself. As the
‘representative figure’ of the ‘national renewal’, Hitler could for the
most part function as activator and enabler of the forces he had
unleashed, authorizing and legitimating actions taken by others now
rushing to implement what they took to be his wishes. ‘Working
towards the Fuhrer’ functioned as the underlying maxim of the
regime from the outset.

Hitler was, in fact, in no position to act as an outright dictator
when he came to office on 30 January 1933. As long as Hindenburg
lived, there was a potential rival source of loyalty — not least for the
army. But by summer 1934, when he combined the headship of
state with the leadership of government, his power had effectively
shed formal constraints on its usage. And, by then, the personality

cult built around Hitler had reached new levels of idolatry and
made millions of new converts as the ‘people’s chancellor’ — as
propaganda had styled him — came to be seen as a national, not
merely party, leader. Disdain and detestation for a parliamentary
system generally perceived to have failed miserably had resulted in
willingness to entrust monopoly control over the state to a leader
claiming a unique sense of mission and invested by his mass
following with heroic, almost messianic, qualities. Conventional
forms of government were, as a consequence, increasingly exposed
to the arbitrary inroads of personalized power. It was a recipe for
disaster.

There were few hints of this at the beginning. Aware that his
position was by no means secure, and not wanting to alienate his
coalition partners in the government of ‘national concentration’,
Hitler was at first cautious in cabinet meetings, open to suggestions,
ready to take advice — not least in complex matters of finance and
economic policy — and not dismissive of opposing viewpoints. This
only started to change in April and May. In the early weeks, Finance
Minister Schwerin von Krosigk, who had met Hitler for the first
time when the cabinet was sworn in on 30 January, was not alone
in finding him ‘polite and calm’ in the conduct of government
business, well-briefed, backed by a good memory, and able to ‘grasp
the essentials of a problem’, concisely sum up lengthy deliberations,
and put a new construction on an issue.

Hitler’s cabinet met for the first time at five o’clock on 30
January 1933. The Reich Chancellor began by pointing out that
millions greeted with joy the cabinet now formed under his
leadership, and asked his colleagues for their support. The cabinet
then discussed the political situation. Hitler commented that
postponing the recall of the Reichstag — due to meet on 31 January
after a two-month break — would not be possible without the
Zentrum’s support. A Reichstag majority could be achieved by

banning the KPD, but this would prove impracticable and might
provoke a general strike. He was anxious to avoid any involvement
of the Reichswehr in suppressing such a strike — a comment
favourably received by Defence Minister Blomberg. The best hope,
Hitler went on, was to have the Reichstag dissolved and win a
majority for the government in new elections. Only Hugenberg — as
unwilling as Hitler to have to rely on the Zentrum, but also aware
that new elections would be likely to favour the NSDAP - spoke out
expressly in favour of banning the KPD in order to pave the way for
an Enabling Act. He doubted that a general strike would take place.
He was appeased when Hitler vouched for the fact that the cabinet
would remain unchanged after the election. Papen favoured
proposing an Enabling Act immediately and reconsidering the
position once it had been rejected by the Reichstag. Other ministers,
anticipating no promises of support from the Zentrum, preferred
new elections to the threat of a general strike. The meeting was
adjourned without firm decisions. But Hitler had already outflanked
Hugenberg, and won support for what he wanted: the earliest
possible dissolution of the Reichstag and new elections.

The following evening, Hindenburg was persuaded to grant Hitler
that which he had refused Schleicher only four days earlier: the
dissolution of the Reichstag. Hitler had argued, backed by Papen
and Meissner, that the people must be given the opportunity to
confirm its support for the new government. Though it could attain
a majority in the Reichstag as it stood, new elections would produce
a larger majority, which in turn would allow a general Enabling Act
to be passed, giving a platform for measures to bring about a
recovery. The dissolution scarcely conformed to the spirit of the
Constitution. Elections were turned into a consequence, not a cause,
of the formation of a government. The Reichstag had not even been
given the opportunity of demonstrating its confidence (or lack of it)
in the new government. A decision which was properly parliament’s
had been placed directly before the people. In its tendency, it was
already a step towards acclamation by plebiscite.

Hitler’s opening gambit stretched no further than new elections,
to be followed by an Enabling Act. His conservative partners, as
keen as he was to end parliamentarism and eliminate the Marxist
parties, had played into his hands. On the morning of 1 February he
told the cabinet of Hindenburg’s agreement to dissolve the
Reichstag. The elections were set for 5 March. The Reich Chancellor
himself provided the government’s slogan: ‘Attack on Marxism.’
That evening, with his cabinet standing behind him in his room in
the Reich Chancellery, wearing a dark blue suit with a black and
white tie, sweating profusely from nervousness, and speaking —
unusually — in a dull monotone, Hitler addressed the German people
for the first time on the radio. The ‘Appeal of the Reich Government
to the German People’ that he read out was full of rhetoric but
vacuous in content — the first propaganda shot in the election
campaign rather than a stated programme of political measures. Full
of pathos, Hitler appealed on behalf of the government to the
people to overcome class divisions, and to sign alongside the
government an act of reconciliation to permit Germany’s
resurgence. ‘The parties of Marxism and those who went along with
them had fourteen years to see what they could do. The result is a
heap of ruins. Now, German people, give us four years and then
judge and sentence us,’ he declared. He ended, as he often
concluded major speeches, in pseudo-religious terms, with an appeal
to the Almighty to bless the work of the governent. With that, the
election campaign had begun. It was to be a different campaign
from the earlier ones, with the government — already enjoying wide
backing —- clearly separating itself from all that had preceded it in
the Weimar Republic.

Towards the end of his proclamation, Hitler had posed for the
first time as a man of peace, stating, despite love of the army as the
bearer of arms and symbol of Germany’s great past, how happy the
government would be ‘if through a restriction of its armaments the
world should make an increase of our own weapons never again
necessary’. His tone when invited by Blomberg to address military
leaders gathered in the home of the head of the army General Kurt

Freiherr von Hammerstein-Equord on the evening of 3 February
was entirely different.

The atmosphere was cool, the attitude of many of the officers
reserved, when Hitler began his lengthy speech. But what he said
could not fail to find appeal. The build-up of the armed forces was
the most important premiss to the central aim of regaining political
power. General conscription had to be brought back. Before that,
the state leadership had to see to it that all traces of pacifism,
Marxism, and Bolshevism were eradicated from those eligible for
military service. The armed forces — the most important institution
in the state - must be kept out of politics and above party. The
internal struggle was not its concern, and could be left to the
organizations of the Nazi movement. Preparations for the build-up
of the armed forces had to take place without delay. This period
was the most dangerous, and Hitler held out the possibility of a
preventive strike from France, probably together with its allies in
the east. ‘How should political power, once won, be used?’ he
asked. It was still too early to say. Perhaps the attainment of new
export possibilities should be the goal, he hinted. But since earlier in
the speech he had already dismissed the notion of increasing exports
as the solution to Germany’s problems, this could not be taken by
his audience as a favoured suggestion. ‘Perhaps — and probably
better — conquest of new living space in the east and its ruthless
Germanization’ was his alternative. The officers present could have
been left in no doubt that this was Hitler’s preference.

Hitler’s sole aim at Hammerstein’s had been to woo the officers
and ensure army support. He largely succeeded. There was no
opposition to what he had said. And many of those present, as
Admiral Erich Raeder later commented, found Hitler’s speech
‘extraordinarily satisfying’. This was hardly surprising. However
disdainful they were of the vulgar and loudmouthed social upstart,
the prospect he held out of restoring the power of the army as the
basis for expansionism and German dominance accorded with aims
laid down by the army leadership even in what they had seen as the
dark days of ‘fulfilment policy’ in the mid-1920s.

The strong man in Blomberg’s ministry, his Chief of the
Ministerial Office, Colonel Walther von Reichenau — bright,
ambitious, ‘progressive’ in his contempt for class-ridden aristocratic
and bourgeois conservatism, and long a National Socialist
sympathizer — was sure of how the army should react to what Hitler
offered. ‘It has to be recognized that we are in a revolution,’ he
remarked. ‘What is rotten in the state has to go, and that can only
happen through terror. The party will ruthlessly proceed against
Marxism. Task of the armed forces: stand at ease. No support if
those persecuted seek refuge with the troops.’ Though not for the
most part as actively sympathetic towards National Socialism as was
Reichenau, the leaders of the army which had blocked by force
Hitler’s attempt to seize power in 1923 had now, within days of his
appointment as Chancellor, placed the most powerful institution in
the state at his disposal.

Hitler, for his part, lost no time in making plain to the cabinet
that military spending was to be given absolute priority. During a
discussion in cabinet on 8 February on the financial implications of
building a dam in Upper Silesia, he intervened to tell his cabinet
colleagues that ‘the next five years must be devoted to the
restoration of the defence capacity of the German people’. Every
state-funded work-creation scheme had to be judged with regard to
its necessity for this end. ‘This idea must always and everywhere be
placed in the foreground.’

These early meetings, within days of Hitler becoming Chancellor,
were crucial in determining the primacy of rearmament. They were
also typical for the way Hitler operated, and for the way his power
was exercised. Keen though Blomberg and the Reichswehr
leadership were to profit from the radically different approach of
the new Chancellor to armaments spending, there were practical
limitations — financial, organizational, and not least those of
international restrictions while the disarmament talks continued —
preventing the early stages of rearmament being pushed through as
rapidly as Hitler wanted. But where Blomberg was content at first
to work for expansion within the realms of the possible, Hitler

thought in different — initially quite unrealistic —- dimensions. He
offered no concrete measures. But his dogmatic assertion of absolute
primacy for rearmament, opposed or contradicted by not a single
minister, set new ground-rules for action. With Hjalmar Schacht
succeeding Hans Luther in March as President of the Reichsbank,
Hitler found the person he needed to mastermind the secret and
unlimited funding of rearmament. Where the Reichswehr budget
had on average been 700-800 million RM a year, Schacht, through
the device of Mefo-Bills — a disguised discounting of government
bills by the Reichsbank — was soon able to guarantee to the
Reichswehr the fantastic sum of 35 billion RM over an eight-year
period.

Given this backing, after a sluggish start, the rearmament
programme took off stratospherically in 1934. The decision to give
absolute priority to rearmament was the basis of the pact, resting
on mutual benefit, between Hitler and the army which, though
frequently troubled, was a key foundation of the Third Reich. Hitler
established the parameters in February 1933. But these were no
more than the expression of the entente he had entered into with
Blomberg on becoming Chancellor. The new policy was possible
because Hitler had bound himself to the interests of the most
powerful institution in the land. The army leaders, for their part,
had their interests served because they had bound themselves, in
their eyes, to a political front-man who could nationalize the masses
and restore the army to its rightful power-position in the state.
What they had not reckoned with was that within five years the
traditional power-élite of the officers corps would be transformed
into a mere functional élite, serving a political master who was
taking it into uncharted territory.

Ill

In the first weeks of his Chancellorship, Hitler took steps to bring
not just the ‘big battalions’ of the army leadership behind the new
regime, but also the major organizations of economic leaders.

Landholders needed little persuasion. Their main organization, the
Reich Agrarian League (Reichslandbund) — dominated by East
Elbian estate-owners — had been strongly pro-Nazi before Hitler
became Chancellor. Hitler left agrarian policy in its initial stage to
his German National coalition partner Hugenberg. Early measures
taken in February to defend indebted farm property against
creditors and to protect agricultural produce by imposing higher
import duties and provide support for grain prices ensured that the
agrarians were not disappointed. With Hugenberg at the Economics
Ministry, their interests seemed certain to be well looked after.

The initial scepticism, hesitancy, and misgivings of most business
leaders immediately following Hitler’s accession to the
Chancellorship were not dispelled overnight. There was still
considerable disquiet in the business community when Gustav Krupp
von Bohlen und Halbach, head of the mighty Krupp’s iron and steel
concern and chairman of the Reich Association of German Industry,
and other leading industrialists received invitations to a meeting at
Goring’s official residence on 20 February, at which Hitler would
outline his economic policy. Krupp, up to then critical of Hitler,
went to the meeting prepared, as he had done at meetings with
previous Chancellors, to speak up for industry. In particular, he
intended to stress the need for export-led growth and to underline
the damaging consequences of protectionism in favour of
agriculture. In the event, he could make neither point. The
businessmen were kept waiting by Goring, and had to wait even
longer till Hitler appeared. They were then treated to a classic
Hitler monologue. In a speech lasting an hour and a half, he barely
touched on economic matters, except in the most general sense. He
assuaged his business audience, as he had done on earlier occasions,
by upholding private property and individual enterprise, and by
denying rumours of planned radical experimentation in the
economy. The rest was largely a restatement of his views on the
subordination of the economy to politics, the need to eradicate
Marxism, restore inner strength and unity, and thus be in a position
to face external enemies. The coming election marked a final chance

to reject Communism by the ballot-box. If that did not happen,
force — he darkly hinted — would be used. It was a fight to the death
between the nation and Communism, a struggle that would decide
Germany’s fate for the next century. When Hitler had finished,
Krupp felt in no position to deliver his prepared speech. He merely
improvised a few words of thanks and added some general remarks
about a strong state serving the well-being of the country. At this
point, Hitler left.

The hidden agenda of the meeting became clear once Goring
started speaking. He repeated Hitler’s assurances that economic
experiments need not be feared, and that the balance of power
would not be altered by the coming election — to be the last for
perhaps a hundred years. But the election, he claimed, was
nonetheless crucial. And those not in the forefront of the political
battle had a responsibility to make financial sacrifices. Once Goring,
too, had left, Schacht bade those present to visit the cash-till. Three
million marks were pledged, and within weeks delivered. With this
donation, big business was helping consolidate Hitler’s rule. But the
offering was less one of enthusiastic backing than of political
extortion.

Despite their financial support, industrialists continued at first to
look with a wary eye at the new regime. But its members were
already realizing that their position was also not left untouched by
the changes sweeping over Germany. In early April, Krupp
capitulated to Nazi pressure to replace the Reich Association by a
new, nazified body, for the dismissal of Jewish employees, and the
removal of all Jewish businessmen from representative positions in
commerce and industry. The following month, the once-mighty
Association dissolved itself and was replaced by the nazified Reich
Estate of German Industry (Reichsstand der Deutschen Industrie).
Alongside such pressure, business recovery, high profits, secure
private property (apart from that of Jewish businessmen), the
crushing of Marxism, and the subduing of labour saw big business
increasingly content to adjust to full collaboration with the new
regime, whatever the irksome bureaucratic controls imposed on it.

Hitler’s style, as the industrialists experienced on 20 February,
was certainly different from that of his predecessors in the
Chancellor’s office. His views on the economy were also
unconventional. He was wholly ignorant of any formal
understanding of the principles of economics. For him, as he stated
to the industrialists, economics was of secondary importance,
entirely subordinated to politics. His crude social-Darwinism
dictated his approach to the economy, as it did his entire political
‘world-view’. Since struggle among nations would be decisive for
future survival, Germany’s economy had to be subordinated to the
preparation, then carrying out, of this struggle. That meant that
liberal ideas of economic competition had to be replaced by the
subjection of the economy to the dictates of the national interest.
Similarly, any ‘socialist’ ideas in the Nazi programme had to follow
the same dictates. Hitler was never a socialist. But although he
upheld private property, individual entrepreneurship, and economic
competition, and disapproved of trade unions and workers’
interference in the freedom of owners and managers to run their
concerns, the state, not the market, would determine the shape of
economic development. Capitalism was, therefore, left in place. But
in operation it was turned into an adjunct of the state.

Lacking, as he did, a grasp of even the rudiments of economic
theory, Hitler can scarcely be regarded as an economic innovator.
The extraordinary economic recovery that rapidly formed an
essential component of the Fuhrer myth was not of Hitler’s making.
He showed no initial interest in the work-creation plans eagerly
developed by civil servants in the Labour Ministry. With Schacht (at
this stage) sceptical, Hugenberg opposed, Seldte taking little
initiative, and industry hostile, Hitler did nothing to further the
work-creation schemes before the end of May. By then, they had
been taken up by the State Secretary in the Finance Ministry, Fritz
Reinhardt, and put forward as a programme for action. Even at this
stage, Hitler remained hesitant, and had to be convinced that the
programme would not lead to renewed inflation. Finally, on 31
May, Hitler summoned ministers and economic experts to the Reich

Chancellery, and heard that all but Hugenberg were in favour of the
Reinhardt Programme. The following day, the ‘Law for Reduction of
Unemployment’ was announced. Schacht now conjured up the
necessary short-term credits. The rest was largely the work of
bankers, civil servants, planners, and industrialists. As public works
schemes initially, then increasingly rearmament, began to pull
Germany out of recession and wipe away mass unemployment more
quickly than any forecasters had dared speculate, Hitler garnered
the full propaganda benefit.

But indirectly Hitler did make a significant contribution to the
economic recovery by reconstituting the political framework for
business activity and by the image of national renewal that he
represented. The ruthless assault on Marxism and reordering of
industrial relations which he presided over, the work-creation
programme that he eventually backed, and the total priority for
rearmament laid down at the outset, helped to shape a climate in
which economic recovery — already starting as he took office as
Chancellor — could gather pace. And in one area, at least, he
provided a direct stimulus to recovery in a key branch of industry:
motor-car manufacturing.

Hitler’s propaganda instinct, not his economic know-how, led him
towards an initiative that both assisted the recovery of the economy
and caught the public imagination. On 11 February, a few days
before his meeting with the industrialists, Hitler had sought out the
opportunity to deliver the opening address at the International
Automobile and Motor-Cycle Exhibition in Berlin. That the German
Chancellor should make the speech was itself a novelty: this alone
caused a stir. The assembled leaders of the car industry were
delighted. They were even more delighted when they heard Hitler
elevate car manufacture to the position of the most important
industry of the future and promise a programme including gradual
tax relief for the industry and the implementation of a ‘generous
plan for road-building’. If living standards had previously been
weighed against kilometres of railway track, they would in future
be measured against kilometres of roads; these were ‘great tasks

which also belong to the construction programme of the German
economy’, Hitler declared. The speech was later stylized by Nazi
propaganda as ‘the turning-point in the history of German
motorization’. It marked the beginning of the ‘Autobahn-builder’
part of the Fuhrer myth.

Hitler had, in fact, offered no specific programme for the car
industry; merely the prospect of one. Even so, the significance of
Hitler’s speech on 11 February should not be underrated. It sent
positive signals to car manufacturers. They were struck by the new
Chancellor, whose long-standing fascination for the motor-car and
his memory for detail of construction-types and -figures meant he
sounded not only sympathetic but knowledgeable to the car bosses.
The Volkischer Beobachter, exploiting the propaganda potential of
Hitler’s speech, immediately opened up to its readers the prospect
of car-ownership. Not a social élite with its Rolls-Royces, but the
mass of the people with their people’s car (Volksauto) was the
alluring prospect.

In the weeks following his speech, there were already notable
signs that the car industry was picking up. The beginnings of
recovery for the automobile industry had spin-off effects for
factories producing component parts, and for the metal industry.
The recovery was not part of a well-conceived programme on
Hitler’s part. Nor can it be wholly, or even mainly, attributed to his
speech. Much of it would have happened anyway, once the slump
had begun to give way to cyclical recovery. It remains the case,
however, that the car manufacturers were still gloomy about their
prospects before Hitler spoke.

Hitler, whatever importance he had attached to the propaganda
effect of his speech, had given the right signals to the industry.
After the ‘gigantic progamme’ of road-building he announced on 1
May had met substantial obstacles in the Transport Ministry, Hitler
insisted that the ‘Reich Motorways Enterprise’ be carried through.
This was eventually placed at the end of June in the hands of Fritz
Todt as General Inspector for German Roadways. In the stimulus to
the car trade and the building of the motorways — areas which,

inspired by the American model, had great popular appeal and
appeared to symbolize both the leap forward into an exciting,
technological modern era and the ‘new Germany’, now standing on
its own feet again — Hitler had made a decisive contribution.

By the time Hitler addressed the leaders of the automobile industry
on 11 February, the Reichstag election campaign was under way.
Hitler had opened it the previous evening with his first speech in
the Sportpalast since becoming Chancellor. He promised a
government that would not lie to and swindle the people as Weimar
governments had done. Parties of class division would be destroyed.
‘Never, never will I depart from the task of eradicating from
Germany Marxism and its accompaniments,’ he declared. National
unity, resting on the German peasant and the German worker —
restored to the national community — would be the basis of the
future society. It was, he declared, ‘a programme of national revival
in all areas of life, intolerant towards anyone who sins against the
nation, brother and friend to anyone willing to fight alongside for
the resurrection of his people, of our nation’. Hitler reached the
rhetorical climax of his speech. ‘German people, give us four years,
then judge and sentence us. German people, give us four years, and
I swear that as we and I entered into this office, I will then be
willing to go.’

It was a powerful piece of rhetoric. But it was little more than
that. The ‘programme’ offered nothing concrete — other than the
showdown with Marxism. National ‘resurrection’ to be brought
about through will, strength, and unity was what it amounted to.
For all nationalists — not just for Nazis — the sentiments Hitler
expressed could not fail to find appeal.

The accompaniment to the campaign was a wave of unparalleled
state-sponsored terror and repression against political opponents in
states under Nazi control. Above all, this was the case in the huge
state of Prussia, which had already come under Reich control in the

Papen takeover of 20 July 1932. The orchestrator here was the
commissary Prussian Minister of the Interior Hermann Goring.
Under his aegis, heads of the Prussian police and administration
were ‘cleansed’ (following the first purges after the Papen coup) of
the remainder of those who might prove obstacles in the new wind
of change that was blowing. Goring provided their successors with
verbal instructions in unmistakably blunt language of what he
expected of police and administration during the election campaign.
And in a written decree of 17 February, he ordered the police to
work together with the ‘national associations’ of SA, SS, and
Stahlhelm, support ‘national propaganda with all their strength’, and
combat the actions of ‘organizations hostile to the state’ with all the
force at their disposal, ‘where necessary making ruthless use of
firearms’. He added that policemen using firearms would, whatever
the consequences, be backed by him; those failing in their duty out
of a ‘false sense of consideration’ had, on the contrary, to expect
disciplinary action. Unsurprisingly in such a climate, the violence
unleashed by Nazi terror bands against their opponents and against
Jewish victims was uncontrolled. This was especially the case once
the SA, SS, and Stahlhelm had been brought in on 22 February as
‘auxiliary police’ on the pretext of an alleged increase in ‘left-
radical’ violence. Intimidation was massive. Communists were
particularly savagely repressed. Individuals were brutally beaten,
tortured, seriously wounded, or killed, with total impunity.
Communist meetings and demonstrations were banned, in Prussia
and in other states under Nazi control, as were their newspapers.
Bans, too, on organs of the SPD and restrictions on reporting
imposed on other newspapers effectively muzzled the press, even
when the bans were successfully challenged in the courts as illegal,
and the newspapers reinstated.

During this first orgy of state violence, Hitler played the
moderate. His acting ability was undiminished. He gave the cabinet
the impression that radical elements in the movement were
disobeying his orders but that he would bring them under control,

and asked for patience to allow him to discipline the sections of the
party that had got out of hand.

Hitler had no need to involve himself in the violence of February
1933. Its deployment could be left safely to Goring, and to leading
Nazis in other states. In any case, it needed only the green light to
Nazi thugs, sure now of the protection of the state, to unleash their
pent-up aggression against those well known to them as long-
standing enemies in their neighbourhoods and work-places. The
terror-wave in Prussia in February was the first sign that state-
imposed constraints on inhumanity were now suddenly lifted. It was
an early indicator of the ‘breach of civilization’ that would give the
Third Reich its historical character.

But it was not that the brutality and violence damaged Hitler’s
reputation in the population. Many who had been initially sceptical
or critical were beginning, during February, to think that Hitler was
‘the right man’, and should be given a chance. A slight upturn in the
economy helped. But the fervent anti-Marxism of much of the
population was more important. The long-standing hatred of
Socialism and Communism — both bracketed together as ‘Marxism’ —
was played upon by Nazi propaganda and turned into outright anti-
Communist paranoia. Pumped up by the Nazis, fear of a Communist
rising was in the air. The closer the election came, the shriller grew
the hysteria.

The violence and intimidation would probably have continued in
much the same vein until the election on 5 March. Nothing suggests
the Nazi leadership had anything more spectacular in mind. But on
27 February, Marinus van der Lubbe set fire to the Reichstag.

Marinus van der Lubbe came from a Dutch working-class family,
and had formerly belonged to the Communist Party youth
organization in Holland. He had eventually broken with the
Communist Party in 1931. He arrived in Berlin on 18 February
1933. He was twenty-four years old, intelligent, a solitary
individual, unconnected with any political groups, but possessed of
a strong sense of injustice at the misery of the working class at the
hands of the capitalist system. In particular, he was determined to

make a lone and spectacular act of defiant protest at the
‘Government of National Concentration’ in order to galvanize the
working class into struggle against their repression. Three attempts
at arson on 15 February in different buildings in Berlin failed. Two
days later he succeeded in his protest — though the consequences
were scarcely those he had envisaged.

On the evening of 27 February, Putzi Hanfstaengl should have
been dining at Goebbels’s house, along with Hitler. But, suffering
from a heavy cold and high temperature, he had taken to his bed in
a room in Goring’s official residence, where he was temporarily
accommodated, in the immediate vicinity of the Reichstag building.
In mid-evening he was awakened by the cries of the housekeeper:
the Reichstag was on fire. He shot out of bed, looked out of the
window, saw the building in flames, and immediately rushed to ring
up Goebbels, saying, breathlessly , that he urgently had to speak to
Hitler. When Goebbels asked what it was about, and whether he
could pass on a message, Hanfstaeng]l said: ‘Tell him the Reichstag is
burning.’ ‘Is that meant to be a joke?’ was Goebbels’s reply.
Goebbels thought it was ‘a mad fantasy report’ and refused at first
to tell Hitler. But his inquiries revealed that the report was true. At
that, Hitler and Goebbels raced through Berlin, to find Goring
already on the scene and ‘in full flow’. Papen soon joined them. The
Nazi leaders were all convinced that the fire was a signal for a
Communist uprising — a ‘last attempt’, as Goebbels put it, ‘through
fire and terror to sow confusion in order in the general panic to
grasp power for themselves’. Fears that the Communists would not
remain passive, that they would undertake some major show of
force before the election, had been rife among the Nazi leadership —
and among non-Nazi members of the national government. A police
raid on the KPD’s central offices in Karl-Liebknecht House on 24
February had intensified the anxieties. Though they actually found
nothing of note, the police claimed to have found vast amounts of
treasonable material, including leaflets summoning the population
to armed revolt. Goring added to this with a statement to the press.
The police discoveries showed that Germany was about to be cast

into the chaos of Bolshevism, he alleged. Assassinations of political
leaders, attacks on public buildings, and the murder of wives and
families of public figures were among the horrors he evoked. No
evidence was ever made public.

The first members of the police to interrogate van der Lubbe,
who had been immediately apprehended and had straight away
confessed, proclaiming his ‘protest’, had no doubt that he had set
fire to the building alone, that no one else was implicated. But
Goring took little convincing from officials on the spot that the fire
must have been the product of a Communist plot. Hitler, who
arrived towards 10.30 p.m., an hour or so after Goring, was rapidly
persuaded to draw the same conclusion. He told Papen: ‘This is a
God-given signal, Herr Vice-Chancellor! If this fire, as I believe, is
the work of the Communists, then we must crush out this
murderous pest with an iron fist!’ The Communist deputies were to
be hanged that very night, he raged. Nor was any mercy to be
shown to the Social Democrats or Reichsbanner.

Hitler then went to an improvised meeting around 11.15 p.m. in
the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, dealing mainly with security
implications for Prussia, and from there accompanied Goebbels to
the Berlin offices of the Volkischer Beobachter, where an
inflammatory editorial was rapidly prepared and a new front page
of the party newspaper made up.

At the meeting in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, it was the
German National State Secretary Ludwig Grauert, firmly convinced
himself that the Communists had set the Reichstag alight, who
proposed an emergency decree for the State of Prussia aimed at
arson and acts of terror. By the following morning, however, Reich
Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick had come up with the draft of
a decree ‘For the Protection of People and State’ which extended the
emergency measures to the whole of the Reich — something
attributed by Blomberg to Hitler’s presence of mind — and gave the
Reich government powers of intervention in the Lander. The road to
dictatorship was now wide open.

The emergency decree ‘For the Protection of People and State’
was the last item dealt with by the cabinet at its meeting on the
morning of 28 February. With one brief paragraph, the personal
liberties enshrined in the Weimar Constitution — including freedom
of speech, of association, and of the press, and privacy of postal and
telephone communications — were suspended indefinitely. With
another brief paragraph, the autonomy of the Lander was
overridden by the right of the Reich government to intervene to
restore order. This right would be made ample use of in the
immediate aftermath of the election to ensure Nazi control
throughout all the German states. The hastily constructed
emergency decree amounted to the charter of the Third Reich.

By the time of the cabinet meeting, Hitler’s near-hysterical mood
of the previous evening had given way to colder ruthlessness. The
‘psychologically correct moment for the showdown’ with the KPD
had arrived. It was pointless to wait longer, he told the cabinet. The
struggle against the Communists should not be dependent on
‘juristical considerations’. There was no likelihood that this would
be the case. The rounding up of Communist deputies and
functionaries had already been set in train by Goring during the
night in raids carried out with massive brutality. Communists were
the main targets. But Social Democrats, trade unionists, and left-
wing intellectuals such as Carl Ossietzky were also among those
dragged into improvised prisons, often in the cellars of SA or SS
local headquarters, and savagely beaten, tortured, and in some cases
murdered. By April, the number taken into ‘protective custody’ in
Prussia alone numbered some 25,000.

The violence and repression were widely popular. The
‘emergency decree’ that took away all personal liberties and
established the platform for dictatorship was warmly welcomed.
Louise Solmitz, like her friends and neighbours, was persuaded to
cast her vote for Hitler. ‘Now it’s important to support what he’s
doing with every means,’ an acquaintance who had up to then not
supported the NSDAP told her. ‘The entire thoughts and feelings of
most Germans are dominated by Hitler,’ Frau Solmitz commented.

‘His fame rises to the stars, he is the saviour of a wicked, sad
German world.’

On 4 March, Hitler made a final, impassioned plea to the
electorate in a speech broadcast from Konigsberg. When the results
were declared the next day, the Nazis had won 43.9 per cent of the
vote, giving them 288 out of 647 seats in the new Reichstag. Their
nationalist coalition partners had gained 8.0 per cent. Despite the
draconian terror, the KPD had still managed an astonishing 12.3 per
cent, and the SPD 18.3 per cent — together the parties of the Left,
even now, gaining almost a third of all votes cast. The Zentrum
received only a marginally smaller proportion of the vote (11.2 per
cent) than it had done the previous November. Support for the
remaining parties had dwindled almost to nothing. Goebbels
claimed the result as a ‘glorious triumph’. It was rather less than
that. Substantial gains had been certain. They had undoubtedly been
assisted by a late surge following the Reichstag fire. Hitler had
hoped for an absolute majority for the NSDAP. As it was, the
absolute majority narrowly attained by the government coalition
left him dependent on his conservative allies. He would now not be
rid of them at least as long as Hindenburg lived, he was reported as
saying on hearing the results. Still, even allowing for the climate of
intense repression against the Left, 43.9 per cent of the vote was
not easy to attain under the Weimar electoral system. The NSDAP
had profited above all from the support of previous non-voters in a
record turnout of 88.8 per cent. And though the heaviest support
continued to come from Protestant parts of the country, sizeable
gains had this time also been made in Catholic areas which the
NSDAP had earlier found difficult to penetrate. Not least: leaving
aside the Left, not all those who voted for parties other than the
NSDAP were opposed to everything that Hitler stood for. Once
Hitler, the pluralist system liquidated, was able to transform his
public image from party to national leader, a potentially far larger
reservoir of support than that given to him in March 1933 would be
at his disposal.

The election of 5 March was the trigger to the real ‘seizure of
power’ that took place over the following days in those Lander not
already under Nazi control. Hitler needed to do little. Party activists
needed no encouragement to undertake the ‘spontaneous’ actions
that inordinately strengthened his power as Reich Chancellor.

The pattern was in each case similar: pressure on the non-Nazi
state governments to place a National Socialist in charge of the
police; threatening demonstrations from marching SA and SS troops
in the big cities; the symbolic raising of the swastika banner on
town halls; the capitulation with scarcely any resistance of the
elected governments; the imposition of a Reich Commissar under
the pretext of restoring order. The ‘coordination’ process began in
Hamburg even before the election had taken place. In Bremen,
Liibeck, Schaumburg-Lippe, Hesse, Baden, Wtirttemberg, Saxony,
and finally Bavaria — the largest state after Prussia — the process was
repeated. Between 5 and 9 March these states, too, were brought in
line with the Reich government. In Bavaria, in particular, long-
standing acolytes of Hitler were appointed as commissary
government ministers: Adolf Wagner in charge of the Ministry of
the Interior, Hans Frank as Justice Minister, Hans Schemm as
Education Minister. Even more significant were the appointments of
Ernst Rohm as State Commissar without Portfolio, Heinrich
Himmler as commander of the Munich police, and Reinhard
Heydrich — the tall, blond head of the party’s Security Service
(Sicherheitsdienst, SD), a cashiered naval officer, still under thirty,
in the early stages of his meteoric rise to command over the
security police in the SS empire — as head of the Bavarian Political
Police. The weakening of Prussia through the Papen coup and the
effective Nazi takeover there in February provided the platform and
model for the extension of control to the other Lander. These now
passed more or less completely into Nazi hands, with little regard
for the German Nationalist partners. Despite the semblance of
legality, the usurpation of the powers of the Lander by the Reich
was a plain breach of the Constitution. Force and pressure by the

Nazi organizations themselves — political blackmail — had been
solely responsible for creating the ‘unrest’ that had prompted the
alleged restoration of ‘order’. The terms of the emergency decree of
28 February provided no justification since there was plainly no
need for defence from any ‘communist acts of violence endangering
the state’. The only such acts were those of the Nazis themselves.

In the triumphalist atmosphere following the election, the open
violence of rampant bands of Nazi thugs prompted protests from
high quarters to the Reich President as well as to Hitler himself.
Hitler responded in characteristic vein with an aggressive defence of
his SA men in response to Papen’s complaints about affronts to
foreign diplomats, prompted by an incident where a mob (including
SA and SS men) had behaved threateningly towards the wives of
prominent diplomats, beating up one of their chauffeurs, and
tearing the flag from the car of the Romanian ambassador. He had
the impression, he said, that the bourgeoisie had been rescued too
early. Had they experienced six weeks of Bolshevism, then they
would have ‘learnt the difference between the red revolution and
our uprising. I once graphically saw this difference in Bavaria and
have never forgotten it. And I will not let myself be taken away by
anyone at all from the mission that I repeatedly announced before
the election: the annihilation and eradication of Marxism’. Even so,
the violence was becoming counter-productive. On 10 March,
directly referring to harassment of foreigners but blaming it on
Communist provocateurs, Hitler proclaimed that from this day on,
the national government controlled executive power in the whole of
Germany, and that the future course of the ‘national uprising’ would
be ‘directed from above, according to plan’. All molesting of
individuals, obstruction of automobiles, and disturbances to business
life had to stop as a matter of principle. He repeated the sentiments
in a radio address two days later. The exhortations had little effect.

The levels of terror and repression experienced in February in
Prussia had by then wracked the rest of the country. Under the
aegis of Himmler and Heydrich, the scale of arrests in Bavaria was
proportionately even greater than it had been in Prussia. Around

10,000 Communists and Socialists were arrested in March and April.
By June, the numbers in ‘protective custody’ — most of them
workers — had doubled. A good number of those arrested were the
victims of denunciations by neighbours or workmates. So great was
the wave of denunciations following the Malicious Practices Act of
21 March 1933 that even the police criticized it. Just outside the
town of Dachau, about twelve miles from Munich, the first
concentration camp, intended for Marxist functionaries, was set up
in a former powder-mill on 22 March. Its dreaded name soon
became a byword for the largely unspoken horrifying events known
or presumed to take place within its walls.

A day earlier, the regime had showed its other face. If keen to
keep at one remove from the shows of terror, Hitler was again in
his element at the centre of another propaganda spectacular. This
was the ‘Day of Potsdam’, a further masterly concoction of the
newly appointed Reich Minister of People’s Enlightenment and
Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels. In complete detachment from the
sordid bestialities in the brutal showdown with the Left, National
Socialism here put on its best clothes, and proclaimed its union with
Prussian conservatism.

The ‘Day of Potsdam’ was to represent the start of the new Reich
building upon the glories of the old. It was also to denote the
forging of the links between the new Germany and the traditions of
Prussia. The garrison church in Potsdam, where the main ceremony
was to take place, had been founded by the Hohenzollern Kings of
Prussia in the early eighteenth century. The church symbolized the
bonds between the Prussian military monarchy, the power of the
state, and the Protestant religion.

On 21 March 1933, Reich President Hindenburg, in the uniform
of a Prussian field-marshal and raising his baton to the empty
throne of the exiled Kaiser, represented those bonds: throne, altar,
and the military tradition in Prussia’s glory. He was the link
between the past and the present. Hitler marked the present and the
future. Dressed not in party uniform but in a dark morning-suit, he
played the part of the humble servant, bowing deeply before the

revered and elderly Reich President and offering him his hand.
National renewal through unity was the theme of Hitler’s address.
Only with one phrase did he mention those who formed no part of
that unity: they were to be rendered ‘unharmful’. Hindenburg was
elevated to the protector of the ‘new uprising of our people’. He it
was who had ‘entrusted on 30 January the leadership of the Reich
to this young Germany’. ‘It can’t be denied,’ wrote one non-Nazi
observer, impressed by the ‘moderation’ of Hitler’s speech, ‘he has
grown. Out of the demagogue and party leader, the fanatic and
agitator, the true statesman seems — for his opponents surprisingly
enough — to be developing.’ The blending of Prussian tradition and
the National Socialist regime was underlined at the end of the
ceremony by the laying of wreaths on the tombs of the Prussian
kings.

Two days later, it was a different Hitler, brown-shirted again and
imperious, who entered the Kroll Opera House in Berlin, where
Reichstag meetings were now to be held, to the jubilant cheers of
serried ranks of uniformed Nazi deputies to propose the Enabling
Act that he had wanted since the previous November. The
atmosphere for their opponents, particularly the SPD deputies, was
menacing. A giant swastika dominated the chamber. Armed men
from the SA, SS, and Stahlhelm guarded all exits and surrounded the
building. They were giving a hint to opposition deputies of what
would be the outcome were the Enabling Act not to find the
necessary level of support. In the absence of the eighty-one
Communist deputies who had been arrested or taken flight, the
Nazis were now in a majority in the Reichstag. But to pass the
Enabling Act a two-thirds majority was necessary.

To ensure the two-thirds majority, Frick had worked out that if
the Communist deputies were simply deducted from the total
membership of the Reichstag, only 378, not 432, votes would be
needed. Goring added that, if necessary, some Social Democrats
could be ejected from the chamber. That is how little the Nazis’
‘legal revolution’ had to do with legality. But the conservatives
present raised no objections. By 20 March, Hitler could confidently

report to the cabinet that, following his discussions, the Zentrum
had seen the necessity of the Enabling Act. Their request for a small
committee to oversee the measures taken under the Act should be
accepted. There would then be no reason to doubt the Zentrum’s
support. ‘The acceptance of the Enabling Act also by the Zentrum
would signify a strengthening of prestige with regard to foreign
countries,’ Hitler commented, aware as always of the propaganda
implications. Frick then introduced the draft of the bill, which was
eventually accepted by the cabinet. The Reich Minister of the
Interior also proposed a blatant manipulation of the Reichstag’s
procedures to make certain of the two-thirds majority. Deputies
absent without excuse should now be counted as present. There
would, therefore, be no problem about a quorum. Absenteeism as a
form of protest abstention was ruled out. Again the conservatives
raised no objections.

The way was clear. On the afternoon of 23 March 1933, Hitler
addressed the Reichstag. The programme he outlined in his
tactically clever two-and-a-half-hour speech, once he had finished
painting the grim picture of the conditions he had inherited, was
framed in the broadest of terms. At the end of his speech, Hitler
made what appeared to be important concessions. The existence of
neither the Reichstag nor the Reichsrat was threatened, he stated.
The position and rights of the Reich President remained untouched.
The Lander would not be abolished. The rights of the Churches
would not be reduced and their relations with the state not altered.

All the promises were soon to be broken. But for the time being
they served their purpose. They appeared to give the binding
declarations safeguarding the position of the Catholic Church which
the Zentrum had demanded in its discussions with Hitler. The SPD
leader, Otto Wels, spoke courageously, given the menacing
atmosphere, movingly upholding the principles of humanity, justice,
freedom, and socialism held dear by Social Democrats. Hitler had
made notes as Wels spoke. He now returned to the rostrum, to
storms of applause from NSDAP deputies, to make the most savage
of replies, every sentence cheered to the rafters. Departing now

from the relative moderation of his earlier prepared speech, Hitler
showed more of his true colours. A sense of law was alone not
enough; possession of power was decisive. There had been no need
to put the current bill before the Reichstag: ‘we appeal in this hour
to the German Reichstag to grant us that which we could have taken
anyway’. With 441 votes to the 94 votes of the Social Democrats,
the Reichstag, as a democratic body, voted itself out of existence.

Power was now in the hands of the National Socialists. It was the
beginning of the end for political parties other than the NSDAP. The
Zentrum’s role had been particularly ignominious. Fearing open
terror and repression, it had given in to Hitler’s tactics of pseudo-
legality. In so doing, it had helped legitimate the removal of almost
all constitutional constraints on his power. He needed in future to
rely neither on the Reichstag, nor on the Reich President. Hitler was
still far from wielding absolute power. But vital steps towards
consolidating his dictatorship now followed in quick succession.

During the spring and summer of 1933, Germany fell into line
behind its new rulers. Hardly any spheres of organized activity,
political or social, were left untouched by the process of
Gleichschaltung — the ‘coordination’ of institutions and organizations
now brought under Nazi control. Pressure from below, from Nazi
activists, played a major role in forcing the pace of the
‘coordination’. But many organizations showed themselves only too
willing to anticipate the process and to ‘coordinate’ themselves in
accordance with the expectations of the new era. By the autumn,
the Nazi dictatorship — and Hitler’s own power at its head — had
been enormously strengthened. Beyond indications that his instinct
for the realities of power and the manipulative potential of
propaganda were as finely tuned as ever, Hitler needed to take
remarkably few initiatives to bring this about.

One initiative that did come from Hitler was, however, the
creation of Reich Governors (Reichsstatthalter) to uphold the ‘lines of

policy laid down by the Reich Chancellor’ in the Lander. With their
hastily contrived establishment in the ‘Second Law for the
Coordination of the Lander with the Reich’ of 7 April 1933, the
sovereignty of the individual states was decisively undermined. All
indications are that Hitler was anxious, with the establishment of
the Reich Governors, to have trusted representatives in the Lander
who could counter any danger that the grass-roots ‘party revolution’
might run out of control, ultimately even possibly threatening his
own position. The position in Bavaria, where the SA and SS had
their headquarters and where radicals had effected an actual ‘seizure
of power’ in the days since the March election, was especially
sensitive. The improvised creation of the Reich Governors was
brought about with Bavaria, in particular, in mind, to head off the
possibility of a party revolution against Berlin. The former
Freikorps ‘hero’ of the crushing of the Raterepublik, Ritter von Epp,
was already appointed as Reich Governor on 10 April. A further ten
Reich Governors were installed less hurriedly, during May and
June, in the remaining Lander, apart from Prussia, and were drawn
from the senior and most powerful Gauleiter. Their dependence on
Hitler was no less great than his on them. They could be relied
upon, therefore, to serve the Reich government in blocking the
revolution from below when it was becoming counter-productive.

In Prussia, Hitler reserved the position of Reich Governor for
himself. This effectively removed any purpose in retaining Papen as
Reich Commissioner for Prussia. Possibly Hitler was contemplating
reuniting the position of head of government in Prussia with that of
Reich Chancellor, as had been the position under Bismarck. If so, he
reckoned without Goring’s own power-ambitions. Since Papen’s
coup the previous July, there had been no Minister President in
Prussia. Goring had expected the position to become his following
the Prussian Landtag elections on 5 March. But Hitler had not
appointed him. Goring therefore engineered the placing on the
agenda of the newly-elected Prussian Landtag, meeting on 8 April,
the election of the Minister President. Though he had only the
previous day taken over the rights of Reich Governor in Prussia

himself, Hitler now had to bow to the fait accompli. On 11 April,
Goring was appointed Prussian Minister President (retaining his
powers as Prussian Minister of the Interior), and on 25 April the
rights of Reich Governor in Prussia were transferred to him. The
‘Second Coordination Law’ had indirectly but effectively led to the
consolidation of Goring’s extensive power-base in Prussia, built
initially on his control over the police in the most important of the
German states. It was little wonder that Goring responded with
publicly effusive statements of loyalty to Hitler, whom he served as
his ‘most loyal paladin’. The episode reveals the haste and confusion
behind the entire improvised ‘coordination’ of the Lander. But at the
price of strengthening the hand of Goring in Prussia, and the most
thrusting Gauleiter elsewhere, Hitler’s own power had also been
notably reinforced across the Lander.

During the spring and summer of 1933, Hitler stood between
countervailing forces. The dilemma would not be resolved until the
‘Night of the Long Knives’. On the one hand, the pressures, dammed
up for so long and with such difficulty before Hitler’s takeover of
power, had burst loose after the March elections. Hitler not only
sympathized with the radical assault from below on opponents,
Jews, and anyone else getting in the way of the Nazi revolution; he
needed the radicals to push through the upturning of the established
political order and to intimidate those obstructing to fall in line. On
the other hand, as the creation of the Reich Governors had shown,
he was aware of the dangers to his own position if the radical
upheaval got out of hand. And he was sensitive to the fact that the
traditional national-conservative bastions of power, not least
sceptics about National Socialism in the army and important sectors
of business, while having no objections to violence as long as it was
directed at Communists and Socialists, would look differently upon
it as soon as their own vested interests were threatened. Hitler had
no choice, therefore, but to steer an uncomfortable course between
a party revolution which he could by no means fully control and the
support of the army and business which he could by no means do
without. Out of these inherently contradictory forces, the

showdown with the SA would ultimately emerge. In the meantime,
however, there were clear signs of what would become a lasting
trait of the Third Reich: pressure from party radicals, encouraged
and sanctioned at least in part by Hitler, resulting in the state
bureaucracy reflecting the radicalism in legislation and the police
channelling it into executive measures. The process of ‘cumulative
radicalization’ was recognizable from the earliest weeks of the
regime.

Apart from the all-out assault on the Left in the first weeks of
Nazi rule, many outrages had been perpetrated by Nazi radicals
against Jews. Since antisemitism had been the ‘ideological cement’
of the National Socialist Movement from the beginning, offering at
one and the same time a vehicle for actionism and substitute for
revolutionary leanings threatening the fabric of society, this was
scarcely surprising. The takeover of power by the arch-antisemite
Hitler had at one fell swoop removed constraints on violence
towards Jews. Without any orders from above, and without any
coordination, assaults on Jewish businesses and the beating-up of
Jews by Nazi thugs became commonplace. Countless atrocities took
place in the weeks following Hitler’s assumption to power.

Many were carried out by members of the so-called Fighting
League of the Commercial Middle Class (Kampfbund des
gewerblichen Mittelstandes), in which violent antisemitism went
hand in hand with equally violent opposition to department stores
(many of them Jewish owned). The extent of the anti-Jewish
violence prompted Jewish intellectuals and financiers abroad,
especially in the USA, to undertake attempts to mobilize public
feeling against Germany and to organize a boycott against German
goods — a real threat, given the weakness of the German economy.
Beginning in mid-March, the boycott gathered pace and was
extended to numerous European countries. The reaction in
Germany, led by the Fighting League, was predictably aggressive. A
‘counter-boycott’ of Jewish shops and department stores throughout
Germany was demanded. The call was taken up by leading
antisemites in the party, at their forefront and in his element the

Franconian Gauleiter and pathological antisemite Julius Streicher.
They argued that the Jews could serve as ‘hostages’ to force a halt
to the international boycott.

Hitler’s instincts favoured the party radicals. But he was also
under pressure to act. On the ‘Jewish Question’, on which he had
preached so loudly and so often, he could scarcely now, once in
power, back down in the face of the demands of the activists
without serious loss of face within the party. When, on 26 March, it
was reported through diplomatic contacts that the American Jewish
Congress was planning to call the next day for a world-wide boycott
of German goods, Hitler was forced into action. As usual, when
pushed into a corner he had no half-measures. Goebbels was
summoned to the Obersalzberg. ‘In the loneliness of the mountains,’
he wrote, the Fiihrer had reached the conclusion that the authors, or
at least beneficiaries, of the ‘foreign agitation’ - Germany’s Jews —
had to be tackled. ‘We must therefore move to a widely framed
boycott of all Jewish businesses in Germany.’ Streicher was put in
charge of a committee of thirteen party functionaries who were to
organize the boycott. The party’s proclamation of 28 March,
prompted by the Reich Chancellor himself and bearing his imprint,
called for action committees to carry out a boycott of Jewish
businesses, goods, doctors, and lawyers, even in the smallest village
of the Reich. The boycott was to be of indefinite duration. Goebbels
was left to undertake the propaganda preparations. Behind the
entire operation stood pressure from the Fighting League of the
Commercial Middle Class.

Led by Schacht and Foreign Minister von Neurath, counter-
pressures began to be placed on Hitler to halt an action which was
likely to have disastrous effects on the German economy and on its
standing abroad. Hitler at first refused to consider any retreat. But
by 31 March, Neurath was able to report to the cabinet that the
British, French, and American governments had declared their
opposition to the boycott of German goods in their country. He
hoped the boycott in Germany might be called off. It was asking too
much of Hitler to back down completely. The activists were by now

fired up. Abandonment of the boycott would have brought not only
loss of face for Hitler, but the probability that any order cancelling
the ‘action’ would have been widely ignored. However, Hitler did
indicate that he was now ready to postpone the start of the German
boycott from 1 to 4 April in the event of satisfactory declarations
opposing the boycott of German goods by the British and American
governments. Otherwise, the German boycott would commence on
1 April, but would then be halted until 4 April. A flurry of
diplomatic activity resulted in the western governments and, placed
under pressure, Jewish lobby groups distancing themselves from the
boycott of German goods. Hitler’s demands had largely been met.
But by now he had changed his mind, and was again insisting on the
German boycott being carried out. Further pressure from Schacht
resulted in the boycott being confined to a single day — but under
the propaganda fiction that it would be restarted the following
Wednesday, 5 April, if the ‘horror agitation’ abroad against
Germany had not ceased altogether. There was no intention of that.
In fact, already on the afternoon of the boycott day, 1 April,
Streicher announced that it would not be resumed the following
Wednesday.

The boycott itself was less than the success that Nazi propaganda
claimed. Many Jewish shops had closed for the day anyway. In
some places, the SA men posted outside ‘Jewish’ department stores
holding placards warning against buying in Jewish shops were
largely ignored by customers. People behaved in a variety of
fashions. There was almost a holiday mood in some busy shopping
streets, as crowds gathered to see what was happening. Groups of
people discussed the pros and cons of the boycott. Not a few were
opposed to it, saying they would again patronize their favourite
stores. Others shrugged their shoulders. ‘I think the entire thing is
mad, but I’m not bothering myself about it,’ was one, perhaps not
untypical, view heard from a non-Jew on the day. Even the SA men
seemed at times rather half-hearted about it in some places. In
others, however, the boycott was simply a cover for plundering and
violence. For the Jewish victims, the day was traumatic — the

clearest indication that this was a Germany in which they could no
longer feel ‘at home’, in which routine discrimination had been
replaced by state-sponsored persecution.

Reactions in the foreign press to the boycott were almost
universally condemnatory. A damage-limitation exercise had to be
carried out by the new Reichsbank President Schacht to assuage
foreign bankers of Germany’s intentions in economic policy. But
within Germany — something which would repeat itself in years to
come — the dynamic of anti-Jewish pressure from party activists,
sanctioned by Hitler and the Nazi leadership, was now taken up by
the state bureaucracy and channelled into discriminatory legislation.
The exclusion of Jews from state service and from the professions
had been aims of Nazi activists before 1933. Now, the possibility of
pressing for the implementation of such aims had opened up.
Suggestions for anti-Jewish discriminatory measures came from
various quarters. Preparations for overhauling civil service rights
were given a new anti-Jewish twist at the end of March, possibly
(though this is not certain) on Hitler’s intervention. On the basis of
the notorious ‘Aryan Paragraph’ — there was no definition of a Jew —
in the hastily drafted ‘Law for the Restoration of the Professional
Civil Service’ of 7 April, Jews as well as political opponents were
dismissed from the civil service. An exception was made, on
Hindenburg’s intervention, only for Jews who had served at the
front. The three further pieces of anti-Jewish legislation passed in
April — discriminating against the admission of Jews to the legal
profession, excluding Jewish doctors from treating patients covered
by the national insurance scheme, and limiting the number of
Jewish schoolchildren permitted in schools — were all hurriedly
improvised to meet not simply pressure from below but de facto
measures which were already being implemented in various parts of
the country. Hitler’s role was largely confined to giving his sanction
to the legalization of measures already often illegally introduced by
party activists with vested interests in the discrimination running
alongside whatever ideological motivation they possessed.

The seismic shift in the political scene which had taken place in
the month or so following the Reichstag fire had left the Jews fully
exposed to Nazi violence, discrimination, and intimidation. It had
also totally undermined the position of Hitler’s political opponents.
There was now little fight left in oppositional parties. The readiness
to compromise soon became a readiness to capitulate.

Already in March, Theodor Leipart, the chairman of the trade
union confederation, the ADGB, had tried to blow with the wind,
distancing the unions from the SPD and offering a declaration of
loyalty to the new regime. It was to no avail. The planning of the
destruction of the unions was undertaken by the boss of the still
relatively insignificant Nazi union, the Nationalsozialistische
Betriebszellenorganisation (NSBO, National Socialist Factory Cell
Organization), Reinhold Muchow and, increasingly, by Robert Ley,
the NSDAP’s Organization Leader. Hitler was initially hesitant, until
the idea was proposed of coupling it with a propaganda coup. Along
the lines of the ‘Day of Potsdam’, Goebbels prepared another huge
spectacular for 1 May, when the National Socialists usurped the
traditional celebration of the International and turned it into the
‘Day of National Labour’. The ADGB took a full part in the rallies
and parades. Over 10 million people altogether turned out — though
for many a factory workforce attendance was scarcely voluntary.

The following day, the razzmatazz over, SA and NSBO squads
occupied the offices and bank branches of the Social Democratic
trade union movement, confiscated its funds, and arrested its
functionaries. Within an hour, the ‘action’ was finished. The largest
democratic trade union movement in the world had been destroyed.
In a matter of days, its members had been incorporated into the
massive German Labour Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront, DAF),
founded on 10 May under Robert Ley’s leadership.

The once-mighty Social Democratic Party of Germany, the largest
labour movement that Europe had known, was also at an end. It had
been forced during the last years of Weimar into one unholy
compromise after another in its attempts to uphold its legalistic
traditions while at the same time hoping to fend off the worst.

When the worst came, it was ill-equipped. The depression years and
internal demoralization had taken their toll. Otto Wels’s speech on
23 March had shown courage. But it was far too little, and far too
late. Support was haemorrhaging away. During March and April,
the SPD’s paramilitary arm, the huge Reichsbanner, was forced into
dissolution. Party branches were closing down. Activists were under
arrest, or had fled abroad. Some already began preparations for
illegality. Alongside the fear, there was wide disillusionment with
Social Democracy. The flight into exile of many party leaders -
necessary safety measure that it was — enhanced a sense of
desertion. The SPD was by now a rudderless ship. Otto Wels and
other party leaders left for Prague, where a party headquarters in
exile had already been established. All party activities within the
Reich were to be banned, the SPD’s parliamentary representation
abolished, its assets confiscated.

The remaining parties now rapidly caved in, falling domino-style.
The Staatspartei (formerly the DDP, the Deutsche Demokratische
Partei) dissolved itself on 28 June, followed a day later by the
dissolution of the DVP. The Nazis’ conservative coalition partners,
the DNVP - renamed in May the German National Front
(Deutschnationale Front, DNF) — also capitulated on 27 June. It had
been losing members to the NSDAP at an increasing rate; its grass-
roots organizations had been subjected to repression and
intimidation; the Stahlhelm —- many of whose members supported
the DNVP — had been placed under Hitler’s leadership in late April
and was taken into the SA in June; and the party’s leader,
Hugenberg, had become wholly isolated in cabinet, even from his
conservative colleagues. Hugenberg’s resignation from the cabinet
(which many had initially thought he would dominate), on 26 June,
was inevitable after embarrassing the German government through
his behaviour at the World Economic Conference in London earlier
in the month. Without consulting Hitler, the cabinet, or Foreign
Minister von Neurath, Hugenberg had sent a memorandum to the
Economic Committee of the Conference rejecting free trade,
demanding the return of German colonies and land for settlement in

the east. His departure from the cabinet signified the end for his
party. Far from functioning as the ‘real’ leader of Germany, as many
had imagined he would do, and far from ensuring with his
conservative colleagues in the cabinet that Hitler would be ‘boxed
in’, Hugenberg had rapidly become yesterday’s man. Few regretted
it. Playing with fire, Hugenberg, along with his party, the DNVP,
had been consumed by it.

The Catholic parties held out a little longer. But their position
was undermined by the negotiations, led by Papen, for a Reich
Concordat with the Holy See, in which the Vatican accepted a ban
on the political activities of the clergy in Germany. This meant in
effect that, in the attempt to defend the position of the Catholic
Church in Germany, political Catholicism had been sacrificed. By
that stage, in any case, the Zentrum had been losing its members at
an alarming rate, many of them anxious to accommodate
themselves to the new times. Catholic bishops had taken over from
the Zentrum leaders as the main spokesmen for the Church in
dealings with the regime, and were more concerned to preserve the
Church’s institutions, organizations, and schools than to sustain the
weakened position of the Catholic political parties. Intimidation and
pressure did the rest. The arrest of 2,000 functionaries in late June
by Himmler’s Bavarian Political Police concentrated minds and
brought the swift reading of the last rites for the BVP on 4 July. A
day later, the Zentrum, the last-remaining political party outside the
NSDAP, dissolved itself. Little over a week later, the ‘Law against
the New Construction of Parties’ left the NSDAP as the only legal
political party in Germany.

Vil

What was happening at the centre of politics was happening also at
the grass-roots — not just in political life, but in every organizational
form of social activity. Intimidation of those posing any obstacle
and opportunism of those now seeking the first opportunity to jump
on the bandwagon proved an irresistible combination. In countless

small towns and villages, Nazis took over local government.
Teachers and civil servants were particularly prominent in the rush
to join the party. So swollen did the NSDAP’s membership rolls
become with the mass influx of those anxious to cast in their lot
with the new regime — the ‘March Fallen’ (Marzgefallene) as the ‘Old
Fighters’ cynically dubbed them — that on 1 May a bar was imposed
on further entrants. Two and a half million Germans had by now
joined the party, 1.6 million of them since Hitler had become
Chancellor. Opportunism intermingled with genuine idealism.

Much the same applied also to the broad cultural sphere.
Goebbels took up with great energy and enthusiasm his task of
ensuring that the press, radio, film production, theatre, music, the
visual arts, literature, and all other forms of cultural activity were
reorganized. But the most striking feature of the ‘coordination’ of
culture was the alacrity and eagerness with which intellectuals,
writers, artists, performers, and publicists actively collaborated in
moves which not only impoverished and straitjacketed German
culture for the next twelve years, but banned and outlawed some of
its most glittering exponents.

The hopes long cherished of the coming great leader eradicated
the critical faculties of many intellectuals, blinding them to the
magnitude of the assault on freedom of thought as well as action
that they often welcomed. Many of the neo-conservative
intellectuals whose ideas had helped pave the way for the Third
Reich were soon to be massively disillusioned. Hitler turned out for
them in practice to be not the mystic leader they had longed for in
their dreams. But they had helped prepare the ground for the Ftthrer
cult that was taken up in its myriad form by so many others.

Hardly a protest was raised at the purges of university professors
under the new civil service law in April 1933 as many of Germany’s
most distinguished academics were dismissed and forced into exile.
The Prussian Academy of Arts had by then already undertaken its
own ‘cleansing’, demanding loyalty to the regime from all choosing
to remain within its hallowed membership.

The symbolic moment of capitulation of German intellectuals to
the ‘new spirit’ of 1933 came with the burning on 10 May of the
books of authors unacceptable to the regime. University faculties
and senates collaborated. Their members, with few exceptions,
attended the bonfires. The poet Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), whose
works were among those consumed by the flames, had written:
‘Where books are burnt, in the end people are also burnt.’

Scarcely any of the transformation of Germany during the spring
and summer of 1933 had followed direct orders from the Reich
Chancellery. Hitler had rarely been personally involved. But he was
the main beneficiary. During these months popular adulation of the
new Chancellor had reached untold levels. The Fihrer cult was
established, not now just within the party, but throughout state and
society, as the very basis of the new Germany. Hitler’s standing and
power, at home and increasingly abroad, were thereby
immeasurably boosted.

Already in spring 1933, the personality cult surrounding Hitler
was burgeoning, and developing extraordinary manifestations.
‘Poems’ — usually unctuous doggerel verse, sometimes with a
pseudo-religious tone — were composed in his honour. ‘Hitler-Oaks
and ‘Hitler-Lindens’, trees whose ancient pagan symbolism gave
them special significance to volkisch nationalists and nordic cultists,
were planted in towns and villages all over Germany. Towns and
cities rushed to confer honorary citizenship on the new Chancellor.
Streets and squares were named after him.

The levels of hero-worship had never been witnessed before in
Germany. Not even the Bismarck cult in the last years of the
founder of the Reich had come remotely near matching it. Hitler’s
forty-fourth birthday on 20 April 1933 saw an extraordinary
outpouring of adulation as the entire country glutted itself with
festivities in honour of the ‘Leader of the New Germany’. However
well orchestrated the propaganda, it was able to tap popular

sentiments and quasi-religious levels of devotion that could not
simply be manufactured. Hitler was on the way to becoming no
longer the party leader, but the symbol of national unity.

And it became more and more difficult for bystanders who were
less than fanatical worshippers of the new god to avoid at least an
outward sign of acquiescence in the boundless adoration. The most
banal expression of acquiescence, the ‘Heil Hitler’ greeting, now
rapidly spread. For civil servants, it was made compulsory a day
before Hitler’s party was established as the only one permissible in
Germany. Those unable to raise the right arm through physical
disability were ordered to raise their left arm. The ‘German
Greeting’ — ‘Heil Hitler!’ - was the outward sign that the country
had been turned into a ‘Fuhrer state’.

What of the man at the centre of this astonishing idolization?
Putzi Hanfstaengl, by now head of the Foreign Press Section of the
Propaganda Ministry, though not part of the ‘inner circle’, still saw
Hitler at that time frequently and at close quarters. He later
commented how difficult it was to gain access to Hitler, even at this
early period of his Chancellorship. Hitler had taken his long-
standing Bavarian entourage — the ‘Chauffeureska’ as Hanfstaengl
called it — into the Reich Chancellery with him. His adjutants and
chauffeur, Briickner, Schaub, Schreck (successor to Emil Maurice,
sacked after his flirtation with Geli Raubal), and his court
photographer Heinrich Hoffmann were omnipresent, often
hindering contact, frequently interfering in a conversation with
some form of distraction, invariably listening, later backing Hitler’s
own impressions and prejudices. Even Foreign Minister Neurath and
Reichsbank President Schacht found it difficult to gain Hitler’s
attention for more than a minute or two without some intervention
from one or other member of the ‘Chauffeureska’. Only Goring and
Himmler, according to Hanfstaengl, could invariably reckon with a
brief private audience on request with Hitler, though Goebbels, at
least, should be added to Hanfstaengl’s short-list. Hitler’s
unpredictability and lack of any form of routine did not help. As had
always been the case, he tended to be late in bed — often after

relaxing by watching a film (one of his favourites was King Kong) in
his private cinema. Sometimes he scarcely appeared during the
mornings, except to hear reports from Hans Heinrich Lammers, the
head of the Reich Chancellery, and to look over the press with
Goebbels’s right-hand man in the Propaganda Ministry, Walther
Funk. The high-point of the day was lunch. The chef in the Reich
Chancellery, who had been brought from the Brown House in
Munich, had a difficult time in preparing a meal ordered for one
o’clock but often served as much as two hours later, when Hitler
finally appeared. Otto Dietrich, the press chief, took to eating in
any case beforehand in the Kaiserhof, turning up at 1.30 p.m.
prepared for all eventualities. Hitler’s table guests changed daily but
were invariably trusty party comrades. Even during the first
months, conservative ministers were seldom present. Given the
company, it was obvious that Hitler would hardly, if ever, find
himself contradicted. Any sort of remark, however, could prompt a
lengthy tirade — usually resembling his earlier propaganda attacks
on political opponents or recollections of battles fought and won.

It would have been impossible for Hitler to avoid the effects of
the fawning sycophancy which surrounded him daily, sifting the
type of information that reached him, and cocooning him from the
outside world. His sense of reality was by this very process
distorted. His contact with those who saw things in a fundamentally
different light was restricted in the main to stage-managed
interviews with dignatories, diplomats, or foreign journalists. The
German people were little more than a faceless, adoring mass, his
only direct relationship to them in now relatively infrequent
speeches and radio addresses. But the popular adulation he received
was like a drug to him. His own self-confidence was already
soaring. Casual disparaging comments about Bismarck indicated
that he now plainly saw the founder of the Reich as his inferior.
What would turn into a fatal sense of infallibility was more than
embryonically present.

How much of the adulation of Hitler that spread so rapidly
throughout society in 1933 was genuine, how much contrived or

opportunistic, is impossible to know. The result was in any case
much the same. The near-deification of Hitler gave the Chancellor a
status that left all other cabinet ministers and all other party bosses
in the shade. Possibilities of questioning, let alone opposing,
measures which Hitler was known to favour were becoming as good
as non-existent. Hitler’s authority now opened doors to radical
action previously closed, lifted constraints, and removed barriers on
measures that before 30 January 1933 had seemed barely
conceivable. Without direct transmission of orders, initiatives
imagined to be in tune with Hitler’s aims could be undertaken — and
have good chances of success.

One such case was the ‘sterilization law’ — the ‘Law for the
Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring’ — approved by the
cabinet on 14 July 1933. Hitler had nothing directly to do with the
preparation of the law (which was portrayed as having benefits for
the immediate family as well as for society in general). But it was
prepared in the knowledge that it accorded with his expressed
sentiments. And when it came before the cabinet, it did meet with
his outright approval in the face of the objections of Vice-Chancellor
Papen, concerned about Catholic feeling regarding the law. Papen’s
plea for sterilization only with the willing consent of the person
concerned was simply brushed aside by the Chancellor.

Though from a Nazi point of view a modest beginning in racial
engineering, the consequences of the law were far from minor:
some 400,000 victims would be compulsorily sterilized under the
provisions of the Act before the end of the Third Reich.

If Papen was hinting at the cabinet meeting that the Catholic
Church might cause difficulties over the sterilization law, he knew
better than anyone that this was unlikely to be the case. Less than a
week before, he had initialled on behalf of the Reich Goverment the
Reich Concordat with the Vatican which he himself had done so
much to bring about. The Concordat would be signed among great
pomp and circumstance in Rome on 20 July. Despite the continuing
molestation of Catholic clergy and other outrages committed by
Nazi radicals against the Church and its organizations, the Vatican

had been keen to reach agreement with the new government. Even
serious continued harassment once the Concordat had been signed
did not deter the Vatican from agreeing to its ratification on 10
September. Hitler himself had laid great store on a Concordat from
the beginning of his Chancellorship, primarily with a view to
eliminating any role for ‘political Catholicism’ in Germany. At the
very same cabinet meeting at which the sterilization law was
approved, he underlined the triumph which the Concordat marked
for his regime. Only a short time earlier, he remarked, he would not
have thought it possible ‘that the Church would be ready to commit
the bishops to this state. That this had happened, was without doubt
an unreserved recognition of the present regime.’ Indeed, it was an
unqualified triumph for Hitler. The German episcopacy poured out
effusive statements of thanks and congratulations.

Surprisingly, the Protestant Church turned out to be less easy to
handle in the first months of Hitler’s Chancellorship. Though
nominally supported by some two-thirds of the population, it was
divided into twenty-eight separate regional Churches, with different
doctrinal emphases. Perhaps Hitler’s scant regard led him to
underestimate the minefield of intermingled religion and politics
that he entered when he brought his influence to bear in support of
attempts to create a unified Reich Church. His own interest, as
always in such matters, was purely opportunistic. Hitler’s choice —
on whose advice is unclear — as prospective Reich Bishop fell on
Ludwig Miller, a fifty-year-old former naval chaplain with no
obvious qualifications for the position except a high regard for his
own importance and an ardent admiration for the Reich Chancellor
and his Movement. Hitler told Miller he wanted speedy unification,
without any trouble, and ending with a Church accepting Nazi
leadership.

Miller turned out, however, to be a disastrous choice. At the
election of the Reich Bishop on 26 May by leaders of the
Evangelical Church, he gained the support of the nazified wing, the
‘German Christians’, but was rejected by all other sides. Nazi
propaganda supported the German Christians. Hitler himself

publicly backed Miller and on the day before the election broadcast
his support for the forces within the Church behind the new policies
of the state.

The German Christians swept to a convincing victory on 23 July.
But it turned out to be a pyrrhic one. By September, Martin
Niemoller, the pastor of Dahlem, a well-to-do suburb of Berlin, had
received some 2,000 replies to his circular inviting pastors to join
him in setting up a ‘Pastors’ Emergency League’, upholding the
traditional allegiance to the Holy Scripture and Confessions of the
Reformation. It was the beginning of what would eventually turn
into the ‘Confessing Church’, which would develop for some pastors
into the vehicle for opposition not just to the Church policy of the
state, but to the state itself.

Ludwig Muller was finally elected Reich Bishop on 27 September.
But by then, Nazi backing for the German Christians — Miiller’s chief
prop of support — was already on the wane. Hitler was by now keen
to distance himself from the German Christians, whose activities
were increasingly seen as counter-productive, and to detach himself
from the internal Church conflict. A German Christian rally,
attended by 20,000 people, in the Sportpalast in Berlin in mid-
November caused such scandal following an outrageous speech
attacking the Old Testament and the theology of the ‘Rabbi Paul’,
and preaching the need for depictions of a more ‘heroic’ Jesus, that
Hitler felt compelled to complete his dissociation from Church
matters. The ‘Gleichschaltung’ experiment had proved a failure. It
was time to abandon it. Hitler promptly lost whatever interest he
had had in the Protestant Church. He would in future on more than
one occasion again be forced to intervene. But the Church conflict
was for him no more than an irritation.

By autumn 1933, the discord in the Protestant Church was in any
case a mere side-show in Hitler’s eyes. Of immeasurably greater
moment was Germany’s international position. In a dramatic move

on 14 October, Hitler took Germany out of the disarmament talks at
Geneva, and out of the League of Nations. Overnight, international
relations were set on a new footing. The Stresemann era of foreign
policy was definitively at an end. The ‘diplomatic revolution’ in
Europe had begun.

Hitler had played only a limited role in foreign policy during the
first months of the Third Reich. The new, ambitious revisionist
course — aimed at reversion to the borders of 1914, re-acquisition of
former colonies (and winning of some new ones), incorporation of
Austria, and German dominance in eastern and south-eastern Europe
— was worked out by foreign ministry professionals and put forward
to the cabinet as early as March 1933. By the end of April,
Germany’s delegate to the Geneva disarmament talks, Rudolf
Nadolny, was already speaking in private about intentions of
building a large army of 600,000 men. If Britain and France were to
agree to only a far smaller army of 300,000 while minimally
reducing their own armed forces, or if they agreed to disarm
substantially but refused to allow any German rearmament,
Nadolny held out the prospect of Germany walking out of the
disarmament negotiations, and perhaps of the League of Nations
itself. Meanwhile, the new, hawkish Reichswehr Minister,
Blomberg, was impatient to break with Geneva without delay, and
to proceed unilaterally to as rapid a rearmament programme as
possible. Hitler’s own line at this time was a far more cautious one.
He entertained real fears of intervention while German defences
were so weak.

The talks at Geneva remained deadlocked. A variety of plans
were advanced by the British, French, and Italians offering Germany
some concessions beyond the provisions of Versailles, but retaining
clear supremacy in armaments for the western powers. None had
any prospect of acceptance in Germany, though Hitler was prepared
to follow a tactically more moderate line than that pressed by
Neurath and Blomberg. In contrast to the army’s impatience for
immediate — but unobtainable — equality of armaments, Hitler, the
shrewder tactician, was prepared to play the waiting game. At this

point, he could only hope that the evident differences between
Britain and France on the disarmament question would play into his
hands. Eventually, they would do so. Though both major western
powers were anxious at the prospect of a reaarming Germany,
worried by some of the aggressive tones coming from Berlin, and
concerned at the Nazi wave of terror activity in Austria, there were
significant divisions between them. These meant there was no real
prospect of the military intervention that Hitler so feared. Britain
was prepared to be more amenable than the French. The hope was
that through minor concessions, German rearmament could
effectively be retarded. But the British felt tugged along by the
French hard line, while fearing that it would force Germany out of
the League of Nations.

It was, however, Britain that took the lead, on 28 April,
supported by France, in presenting Germany with only the minimal
concession of the right to a 200,000-man army, but demanding a
ban on all paramilitary organizations. Blomberg and Neurath
responded angrily in public. Hitler, worried about the threat of
sanctions by the western powers, and Polish sabre-rattling in the
east, bowed to superior might. He told the cabinet that the question
of rearmament would not be solved around the conference table. A
new method was needed. There was no possibility at the present
time of rearmament ‘by normal methods’. The unity of the German
people in the disarmament question had to be shown ‘to the world’.
He picked up a suggestion put to cabinet by Foreign Minister von
Neurath of a speech to the Reichstag, which would then find
acclamation as government policy.

Hitler seemed to speak, in his address to the Reichstag on 17
May, in the diction of a statesman interested in securing the peace
and well-being of his own country, and of the whole of Europe. ‘We
respect the national rights also of other peoples,’ he stated, and
‘wish from the innermost heart to live with them in peace and
friendship.’ His demands for equal treatment for Germany in the
question of disarmament could sound nothing but justified to
German ears, and outside Germany, too. Germany was prepared to

renounce weapons of aggression, if other countries would do the
same, he declared. Any attempt to force a disarmament settlement
on Germany could only be dictated by the intention of driving the
country from the disarmament negotiations, he claimed. ‘As a
continually defamed people, it would be hard for us to stay within
the League of Nations,’ ran his scarcely veiled threat. It was a clever
piece of rhetoric. He sounded the voice of reason, putting his
adversaries in the western democracies on a propaganda defensive.

The stalemated Geneva talks were postponed until June, then
until October. During this period there were no concrete plans for
Germany to break with the League of Nations. Even later that
month, neither Hitler nor his Foreign Minister Neurath were
reckoning with an early withdrawal. As late as 4 October, Hitler
appears to have been thinking of further negotiations. But on that
very day news arrived of a more unyielding British stance on
German rearmament, toughened to back the French, and taking no
account of demands for equality. That afternoon, Blomberg sought
an audience with Hitler in the Reich Chancellery. Neurath later
acknowledged that he, too, had advised Hitler at the end of
September that there was nothing more to be gained in Geneva.
Hitler recognized that the time was now ripe to leave the League in
circumstances which looked as if Germany was the wronged party.
The propaganda advantage, especially at home where he could be
certain of massive popular support, was too good a chance to miss.

The cabinet was finally informed on 13 October. With a sure eye
as always on the propaganda value of plebiscitary acclaim, Hitler
told his ministers that Germany’s position would be strengthened by
the dissolution of the Reichstag, the setting of new elections, and
‘requiring the German people to identify with the peace policy of
the Reich government through a plebiscite’.

The following day, the Geneva Conference received official
notification of the German withdrawal. The consequences were far-
reaching. The disarmament talks now lost their meaning. The
League of Nations, which Japan had already left earlier in the year,
was fatally weakened. In the decision to leave the League the

timing and propaganda exploitation were vintage Hitler. But
Blomberg, especially, and Neurath had been pressing for withdrawal
long before Hitler became convinced that the moment had arrived
for Germany to gain maximum advantage. Hitler had not least been
able to benefit from the shaky basis of European diplomacy at the
outset of his Chancellorship. The world economic crisis had
undermined the ‘fulfilment policy’ on which Stresemann’s strategy,
and the basis of European security, had been built. The European
diplomatic order was, therefore, already no more stable than a
house of cards when Hitler took up office. The German withdrawal
from the League of Nations was the first card to be removed from
the house. The others would soon come tumbling down.

On the evening of 14 October, in an astutely constructed
broadcast sure of a positive resonance among the millions of
listeners throughout the country, Hitler announced the dissolution
of the Reichstag. New elections, set for 12 November, now provided
the opportunity to have a purely National Socialist Reichstag, free
of the remnants of the dissolved parties. Even though only one
party was contesting the elections, Hitler flew once more
throughout Germany holding election addresses. The propaganda
campaign directed its energies almost entirely to accomplishing a
show of loyalty to Hitler personally — now regularly referred to
even in the still existent non-Nazi press as simply ‘the Ftihrer’.
Electoral manipulation was still not as refined as it was to become
in the 1936 and 1938 plebiscites. But it was far from absent. Various
forms of chicanery were commonplace. Secrecy at the ballot-box
was far from guaranteed. And pressure to conform was obvious.
Even so, the official result —- 95.1 per cent in the plebiscite, 92.1 per
cent in the ‘Reichstag election’ - marked a genuine triumph for
Hitler. Abroad as well as at home, even allowing for manipulation
and lack of freedom, it had to be concluded that the vast majority of
the German people backed him. His stature as a national leader
above party interest was massively enhanced.

Hitler’s conquest of Germany was still, however, incomplete.
Behind the euphoria of the plebiscite result, a long-standing

problem was now threatening to endanger the regime itself: the
problem of the SA.

11
Securing Total Power

Hitler’s unruly party army, the SA, had outlived its purpose. That
had been to win power. Everything had been predicated on the
attainment of that single goal. What would follow the winning of
power, what would be the purpose and function of the SA in the
new state, what benefits would flow for ordinary stormtroopers,
had never been clarified. Now, months after the ‘seizure of power’,
the SA’s ‘politics of hooliganism’ were a force for disruption in the
state. And particularly in the military ambitions of its leader, Ernst
Rohm, the SA was an increasingly destabilizing factor, above all in
relations with the Reichswehr. But its elimination, or
disempowering, was no simple matter. It was a huge organization,
far bigger than the party itself. It contained many of the most
ardent ‘old fighters’ (in a literal sense) in the Movement. And it had
been the backbone of the violent activism which had forced the
pace of the Nazi revolution since Hitler had become Chancellor.
Rohm’s ambitions, as we have seen in earlier chapters, had never
been identical with those of Hitler. A large paramilitary
organization that had never accepted its subordination to the
political wing of the party had caused tensions, and occasional
rebellion, since the 1920s. But, whatever the crises, Hitler had
always managed to retain the SA’s loyalty. To challenge the SA’s
leadership risked losing that loyalty. It could not be done easily or
approached lightly.

The problem of the SA was inextricably bound up with the other
threat to the consolidation of Hitler’s power. Reich President
Hindenburg was old and frail. The issue of the succession would

loom within the foreseeable future. Hindenburg, the symbol of ‘old’
Germany, and ‘old’ Prussia, was the figurehead behind which stood
still powerful forces with somewhat ambivalent loyalties towards
the new state. Most important among them was the army, of which
as Head of State Hindenburg was supreme commander. The
Reichswehr leadership was intensely and increasingly alarmed by
the military pretensions of the SA. Failure on Hitler’s part to solve
the problem of the SA could conceivably lead to army leaders
favouring an alternative as Head of State on Hindenburg’s death —
perhaps resulting in a restoration of the monarchy, and a de facto
military dictatorship. Such a development would have met with
favour among sections, not just of the military old guard, but of
some national-conservative groups, which had favoured an
authoritarian, anti-democratic form of state but had become
appalled by the Hitler regime. The office of the Vice-Chancellor,
Papen, gradually emerged as the focal point of hopes of blunting
the edge of the Nazi revolution. Since Papen continued to enjoy the
favour of the Reich President, such ‘reactionaries’, though small in
number, could not be discounted in power-political terms. And since
at the same time there were growing worries among business
leaders about serious and mounting economic problems, the threat
to the consolidation of Hitler’s power — and with that of the regime
itself — was a real one.

Ernst ROhm’s SA had been the spearhead of the Nazi revolution in
the first months of 1933. The explosion of elemental violence had
needed no commands from above. The SA had long been kept on a
leash, told to wait for the day of reckoning. Now it could scarcely
be contained. Orgies of hate-filled revenge against political enemies
and horrifically brutal assaults on Jews were daily occurrences. A
large proportion of the estimated 100,000 persons taken into
custody in these turbulent months were held in makeshift SA prisons
and camps. Some hundred of these were set up in the Berlin area
alone. Many victims were bestially tortured. The minimal figure of
some 500-600 murdered in what the Nazis themselves proclaimed
as a bloodless and legal revolution can largely be placed on the

account of the SA. The first Gestapo chief, Rudolf Diels, described
after the war the conditions in one of the SA’s Berlin prisons: ‘The
“interrogations” had begun and ended with a beating. A dozen
fellows had laid into their victims at intervals of some hours with
iron bars, rubber coshes, and whips. Smashed teeth and broken
bones bore witness to the tortures. As we entered, these living
skeletons with festering wounds lay in rows on the rotting straw ...’

As long as the terror was levelled in the main at Communists,
Socialists, and Jews, it was in any case not likely to be widely
unpopular, and could be played down as ‘excesses’ of the ‘national
uprising’. But already by the summer, the number of incidents
mounted in which overbearing and loutish behaviour by SA men
caused widespread public offence even in pro-Nazi circles. By this
time, complaints were pouring in from industry, commerce, and
local government offices about disturbances and intolerable actions
by stormtroopers. The Foreign Office added its own protest at
incidents where foreign diplomats had been insulted or even
manhandled. The SA was threatening to become completely
uncontrollable. Steps had to be taken. Reich President Hindenburg
himself requested Hitler to restore order.

The need for Hitler to act became especially urgent after Rohm
had openly stated the SA’s aim of continuing the ‘German
Revolution’ in the teeth of attempts by conservatives, reactionaries,
and opportunist fellow-travellers to undermine and tame it. Rohm
was Clearly signalling to the new rulers of Germany that for him the
revolution was only just starting; and that he would demand a
leading role for himself and the mighty organization he headed — by
now some 4% million strong.

Forced now for the first time to choose between the demands of
the party’s paramilitary wing and the ‘big battalions’ pressing for
order, Hitler summoned the Reich Governors to a meeting in the
Reich Chancellery on 6 July. ‘The revolution is not a permanent
condition,’ he announced; ‘it must not turn into a lasting situation. It
is necessary to divert the the river of revolution that has broken
free into the secure bed of evolution.’ Other Nazi leaders — Frick,

Goring, Goebbels, and Hefg — took up the message in the weeks that
followed. There was an unmistakable change of course.

Rohm’s ambitions were, however, undaunted. They amounted to
little less than the creation of an ‘SA state’, with extensive powers in
the police, in military matters, and in the civil administration. It
was not just a matter of Rohm’s own power ambitions. Within the
gigantic army of Brownshirts, expectations of the wondrous shangri-
la to follow the day when National Socialism took power had been
hugely disappointed. Though they had poured out their bile on their
political enemies, the offices, financial rewards, and power they had
naively believed would flow their way remained elusive. Talk of a
‘second revolution’, however little it was grounded in any clear
programme of social change, was, therefore, bound to find strong
resonance among rank-and-file stormtroopers.

Ernst Rohm had, then, no difficulty in expanding his popularity
among SA men through his continued dark threats in early 1934
about further revolution which would accomplish what the ‘national
uprising’ had failed to bring about. He remained publicly loyal to
Hitler. Privately, he was highly critical of Hitler’s policy towards
the Reichswehr and his dependency on Blomberg and Reichenau.
And he did nothing to deter the growth of a personality cult
elevating his leadership of the SA. At the Reich Party Rally of
Victory in 1933, he had been the most prominent party leader after
Hitler, clearly featuring as the Fihrer’s right-hand man. By early
1934, Hitler had been largely forced from the pages of the SA’s
newspaper, SA-Mann, by the expanding Rohm-cult.

At least in public, the loyalty was reciprocated. Hitler wavered,
as he would continue to do during the first months of 1934,
between Rohm’s SA and the Reichswehr. He could not bring himself
to discipline, let alone dismiss, ROhm. The political damage and loss
of face and popularity involved made such a move risky. But the
realities of power compelled him to side with the Reichswehr
leadership. This became fully clear only at the end of February.

By 2 February 1934, at a meeting of his Gauleiter, Hitler was
again criticizing the SA in all but name. Only ‘idiots’ thought the

revolution was not over; there were those in the Movement who
only understood ‘revolution’ as meaning ‘a permanent condition of
chaos’.

The previous day, Rohm had sent Blomberg a memorandum on
relations between the army and SA. What he appeared to be
demanding — no copy of the actual memorandum has survived — was
no less than the concession of national defence as the domain of the
SA, and a reduction of the function of the armed forces to the
provision of trained men for the SA. So crass were the demands that
it seems highly likely that Blomberg deliberately falsified or
misconstrued them when addressing a meeting of army District
Commanders on 2 February in Berlin. They were predictably
horrified. Now Hitler had to decide, stated Blomberg. The army
lobbied him. In a conscious attempt to win his support against the
SA, Blomberg, without any pressure from the Nazi leadership,
introduced the NSDAP’s emblem into the army and accepted the
‘Aryan Paragraph’ for the officer corps, leading to the prompt
dismissal of some seventy members of the armed forces. Rohm, too,
sought to win his support. But, faced with having to choose between
the Reichswehr, with Hindenburg’s backing, or his party army,
Hitler could now only decide one way.

By 27 February the army leaders had worked out their ‘guidelines
for cooperation with the SA’, which formed the basis for Hitler’s
speech the next day and had, therefore, certainly been agreed with
him. At the meeting in the Reichswehr Ministry on 28 February,
attended by Reichswehr, SA, and SS leaders, Hitler rejected outright
Rohm’s plans for an SA-militia. The SA was to confine its activities
to political, not military, matters. A militia, such as Rohm was
suggesting, was not suitable even for minimal national defence. He
was determined to build up a well-trained ‘people’s army’ in the
Reichswehr, equipped with the most modern weapons, which must
be prepared for all eventualities on defence within five years and
suitable for attack after eight years. He demanded of the SA that
they obey his orders. For the transitional period before the planned
Wehrmacht was set up, he approved Blomberg’s suggestion to

deploy the SA for tasks of border protection and pre-military
training. But ‘the Wehrmacht must be the sole bearer of weapons of
the nation’.

Rohm and Blomberg had to sign and shake hands on the
‘agreement’. Hitler departed. Champagne followed. But the
atmosphere was anything but cordial. When the officers had left,
Rohm was overheard to remark: ‘What the ridiculous corporal
declared doesn’t apply to us. Hitler has no loyalty and has at least to
be sent on leave. If not with, then we’ll manage the thing without
Hitler.’ The person taking note of these treasonable remarks was
SA-Obergruppenfuhrer Viktor Lutze, who reported what had gone
on to Hitler. ‘We’ll have to let the thing ripen’ was all he gleaned as
reply. But the show of loyalty was noted. When he needed a new SA
chief after the events of 30 June, Lutze was Hitler’s man.

From the beginning of 1934, Hitler seems to have recognized that
he would be faced with no choice but to cut Rohm down to size.
How to tackle him was, however, unclear. Hitler deferred the
problem. He simply awaited developments. The Reichswehr
leadership, too, was biding its time, expecting a gradual escalation,
but looking then to a final showdown. Relations between the army
and the SA continued to fester. But Hitler did, it seems, order the
monitoring of SA activities. According to the later account of
Gestapo chief Rudolf Diels, it was in January 1934 that Hitler
requested him and Goring to collect material on the excesses of the
SA. From the end of February onwards, the Reichswehr leadership
started assembling its own intelligence on SA activities, which was
passed to Hitler. Once Himmler and Heydrich had taken over the
Prussian Gestapo in April, the build-up of a dossier on the SA was
evidently intensified. Rohm’s foreign contacts were noted, as well
as those with figures at home known to be cool towards the regime,
such as former Chancellor Schleicher.

By this time, Rohm had incited an ensemble of powerful enemies,
who would eventually coagulate into an unholy alliance against the
SA. Goring was so keen to be rid of the SA’s alternative power-base
in Prussia — which he himself had done much to establish, starting
when he made the SA auxiliary police in February 1933 — that he
was even prepared by 20 April to concede control over the Prussian
Gestapo to Heinrich Himmler, thus paving the way for the creation
of a centralized police-state in the hands of the SS. Himmler himself,
and even more so his cold and dangerous henchman Reinhard
Heydrich, recognized that their ambitions to construct such an
empire — the key edifice of power and control in the Third Reich —
rested on the élite SS breaking with its superior body, the SA, and
eliminating the power-base held by Rohm. In the party, the head of
the organization, installed in April 1933 with the grand title of
Deputy Ftthrer, Rudolf Hef, and the increasingly powerful figure
behind the scenes Martin Bormann, were more than aware of the
contempt in which the Political Organization was held by Rohm’s
men and the threat of the SA actually replacing the party, or making
it redundant. For the army, as already noted, Rohm’s aim to
subordinate the Reichswehr to the interests of a people’s militia was
anathema. Intensified military exercises, expansive parades, and,
not least, reports of extensive weapon collections in the hands of
the SA, did little to calm the nerves.

At the centre of this web of countervailing interests and intrigue,
united only in the anxiety to be rid of the menace of the SA, Hitler’s
sharp instinct for the realities of power by now must have made it
plain that he had to break with Rohm.

In April it became known that Hindenburg was seriously ill.
Hitler and Blomberg had already been told that the end was not far
off. At the beginning of June, the Reich President retired to his
estate at Neudeck in East Prussia. The most important prop of the
conservatives was now far from the centre of the action. And the
succession issue was imminent. Moreover, to remove the obstacle
which the SA was providing to recommencing talks about
rearmament with the western powers, Hitler had, at the end of

May, ordered the SA to stop military exercises, and, in the last talks
he had with Rohm, a few days later, had sent the stormtroopers on
leave for a month.

This defusing of the situation, together with Hindenburg’s
absence, made the situation more difficult, rather than easier, for
the conservatives. But Papen used a speech on 17 June at the
University of Marburg to deliver a passionate warning against the
dangers of a ‘second revolution’ and a heated broadside against the
‘selfishness, lack of character, insincerity, lack of chivalry, and
arrogance’ featuring under the guise of the German revolution. He
even criticized the creation of a ‘false personality cult’. ‘Great men
are not made by propaganda, but grow out of their actions,’ he
declared. ‘No nation can live in a continuous state of revolution,’ he
went on. ‘Permanent dynamism permits no solid foundations to be
laid. Germany cannot live in a continuous state of unrest, to which
no one sees an end.’ The speech met with roars of applause within
the hall. Outside, Goebbels moved swiftly to have it banned, though
not before copies of the speech had been run off and circulated,
both within Germany and to the foreign press. Word of it quickly
went round. Never again in the Third Reich was such striking
criticism at the heart of the regime to come from such a prominent
figure. But if Papen and his friends were hoping to prompt action by
the army, supported by the President, to ‘tame’ Hitler, they were
disappointed. As it was, the Marburg speech served as the decisive
trigger to the brutal action taken at the end of the month.

Hitler’s own mood towards the ‘reactionaries’ was darkening
visibly. Without specifying any names, his speech at Gera at the
Party Rally of the Thuringian Gau on 17 June, the same day as
Papen’s speech, gave a plain indication of his fury at the activities
of the Papen circle. He castigated them as ‘dwarves’, alluding, it
seems, to Papen himself as a ‘tiny worm’. Then came the threat: ‘If
they should at any time attempt, even in a small way, to move from
their criticism to a new act of perjury, they can be sure that what
confronts them today is not the cowardly and corrupt bourgeoisie of
1918 but the fist of the entire people. It is the fist of the nation that

is clenched and will smash down anyone who dares to undertake
even the slightest attempt at sabotage.’ Such a mood prefigured the
murder of some prominent members of the conservative ‘reaction’
on 30 June. In fact, in the immediate aftermath of the Papen
speech, a strike against the ‘reactionaries’ seemed more likely than
a showdown with the SA.

At the imposition of the ban on publishing his speech, Papen went
to see Hitler. He said Goebbels’s action left him no alternative but
to resign. He intended to inform the Reich President of this unless
the ban were lifted and Hitler declared himself ready to follow the
policies outlined in the speech. Hitler reacted cleverly — in wholly
different manner from his tirades in the presence of his party
members. He acknowledged that Goebbels was in the wrong in his
action, and that he would order the ban to be lifted. He also
attacked the insubordination of the SA and stated that they would
have to be dealt with. He asked Papen, however, to delay his
resignation until he could accompany him to visit the President for
a joint interview to discuss the entire situation. Papen conceded —
and the moment was lost.

Hitler wasted no time. He arranged an audience alone with
Hindenburg on 21 June. On the way up the steps to Hindenburg’s
residence, Schlofg Neudeck, he was met by Blomberg, who had been
summoned by the President in the furore following Papen’s speech.
Blomberg told him bluntly that it was urgently necessary to take
measures to ensure internal peace in Germany. If the Reich
Government was incapable of relieving the current state of tension,
the President would declare martial law and hand over control to
the army. Hitler realized that there could be no further
prevarication. He had to act. There was no alternative but to placate
the army — behind which stood the President. And that meant
destroying the power of the SA without delay.

What Hitler had in mind at this stage is unclear. He seems to
have spoken about deposing Rohm, or having him arrested. By now,
however, Heydrich’s SD - the part of the labyrinthine SS
organization responsible for internal surveillance — and the Gestapo

were working overtime to concoct alarmist reports of an imminent
SA putsch. SS and SD leaders were summoned to Berlin around 25
June to be instructed by Himmler and Heydrich about the measures
to be taken in the event of an SA revolt, expected any time. For all
their unruliness, the SA had never contemplated such a move. The
leadership remained loyal to Hitler. But now, the readiness to
believe that Rohm was planning a takeover was readily embraced
by all the SA’s powerful enemies. The Reichswehr, during May and
June becoming increasingly suspicious about the ambitions of the
SA leadership, made weapons and transport available to the SS
(whose small size and — at this time — confinement to largely
policing work posed no threat to the military). An SA putsch was
now thought likely in summer or autumn. The entire Reichswehr
leadership were prepared for imminent action against Rohm. The
psychological state for a strike against the SA was rapidly forming.
Alarm bells were set ringing loudly on 26 June through what
seemed to be an order by Rohm for arming the SA in preparation
for an attack on the Reichswehr. The ‘order’, in fact a near-certain
fake (though by whom was never established), had mysteriously
found its way into the office of the Abwehr chief, Captain Conrad
Patzig. Lutze was present when Blomberg and Reichenau presented
Hitler the following day with the ‘evidence’. Hitler had already
hinted to Blomberg two days earlier that he would summon SA
leaders to a conference at Bad Wiessee on the Tegernsee, some fifty
miles south-east of Munich, where Rohm was residing, and have
them arrested. This decision seems to have been confirmed at the
meeting with Blomberg and Reichenau on 27 June. The same day,
SS-Obergruppenfihrer Sepp Dietrich, commander of Hitler’s
houseguards, the Leibstandarte-SS Adolf Hitler, arranged with the
Reichswehr to pick up the arms needed for a ‘secret and very
important commission of the Fuhrer’.

Ill

The timing of the ‘action’ seems to have been finally determined on
the evening of 28 June, while Hitler, together with Goring and
Lutze, was in Essen for the wedding of Gauleiter Terboven. During
the wedding reception, Hitler had received a message from
Himmler, informing him that Oskar von Hindenburg had agreed to
arrange for his father to receive Papen, probably on 30 June. It
marked a final attempt to win the Reich President’s approval for
moves to constrain the power not only of Rohm and the SA, but of
Hitler himself. Hitler left the wedding reception straight away and
raced back to his hotel. There, according to Lutze, he decided there
was no time to lose: he had to strike.

Rohm’s adjutant was ordered by telephone to ensure that all SA
leaders attended a meeting with Hitler in Bad Wiessee on the late
morning of 30 June. In the meantime, the army had been put on
alert. Goring flew back to Berlin to take charge of matters there,
ready at a word to move not only against the SA, but also the Papen
group.

Rumours of unrest in the SA were passed to Hitler, whose mood
was becoming blacker by the minute. The telephone rang. The
‘rebels’, it was reported, were ready to strike in Berlin. There was,
in fact, no putsch attempt at all. But groups of SA men in different
parts of Germany, aware of the stories circulating of an impending
strike against the SA, or the deposition of Rohm, were going on the
rampage. Sepp Dietrich was ordered to leave for Munich
immediately. Soon after midnight, he phoned Hitler from Munich
and was given further orders to pick up two companies of the
Leibstandarte and be in Bad Wiessee by eleven in the morning.
Around 2 a.m. Hitler left to fly to Munich, accompanied by his
adjutants Briickner, Schaub, and Schreck, along with Goebbels,
Lutze, and Press Chief Dietrich. The first glimmers of dawn were
breaking through as he arrived. He was met by Gauleiter Adolf
Wagner and two Reichswehr officers, who told him that the Munich
SA, shouting abuse at the Fiihrer, had attempted an armed
demonstration in the city. Though a serious disturbance, it was, in
fact, merely the biggest of the protest actions of despairing

stormtroopers, when as many as 3,000 armed SA men had
rampaged through Munich in the early hours, denouncing the
‘treachery’ against the SA, shouting: ‘The Fuhrer is against us, the
Reichswehr is against us; SA out on the streets.’ However, Hitler
had not heard of the Munich disturbances before he arrived there in
the early hours of the morning. Now, in blind rage at what he
interpreted as the betrayal by Rohm - ‘the blackest day of my life’,
he was heard to say — he decided not to wait till the following
morning, but to act immediately.

He and his entourage raced to the Bavarian Ministry of the
Interior. The local SA leaders Obergruppenfihrer Schneidhuber and
Gruppenftihrer Schmid were peremptorily summoned. Hitler’s fury
was still rising as he awaited them. By now he had worked himself
into a near-hysterical state of mind, reminiscent of the night of the
Reichstag fire. Accepting no explanations, he ripped their rank
badges from their shoulders, shouting ‘You are under arrest and will
be shot.’ Bewildered and frightened, they were taken off to
Stadelheim prison.

Hitler, without waiting for Dietrich’s SS men to arrive, now
demanded to be taken immediately to Bad Wiessee. It was just after
6.30 a.m. as the three cars pulled up outside the Hotel Hanselbauer
in the resort on the Tegernsee, where ROhm and other SA leaders
were still sleeping off an evening’s drinking. Hitler, followed by
members of his entourage and a number of policemen, stormed up
to Rohm’s room and, pistol in hand, denounced him as a traitor
(which the astonished Chief of Staff vehemently denied) and
declared him under arrest. Edmund Heines, the Breslau SA leader,
was found in a nearby room in bed with a young man — a scene that
Goebbels’s propaganda later made much of to heap moral
opprobrium on the SA. Other arrests of Rohm’s staff followed.

Hitler and his entourage then travelled back to the Brown House.
At midday he spoke to party and SA leaders gathered in the
‘Senators’ Hall’. The atmosphere was murderous. Hitler was beside
himself, in a frenzy of rage, spittle dribbling from his mouth as he
began to speak. He spoke of the ‘worst treachery in world history’.

Rohm, he claimed, had received 12 million Marks in bribes from
France to have him arrested and killed, to deliver Germany to its
enemies. The SA chief and his co-conspirators, Hitler railed, would
be punished as examples. He would have them all shot. One after
the other, the Nazi leaders demanded the extermination of the SA
‘traitors’. Hef$ pleaded that the task of shooting Rohm fall to him.

Back in his own room, Hitler gave the order for the immediate
shooting of six of the SA men held in Stadelheim, marking crosses
against their names in a list provided by the prison administration.
They were promptly taken out and shot by Dietrich’s men. Not even
a peremptory trial was held. The men were simply told before being
shot: ‘You have been condemned to death by the Fuhrer! Heil
Hitler!’

Rohm’s name was not among the initial six marked by Hitler for
instant execution. One witness later claimed to have overheard
Hitler saying that Rohm had been spared because of his many
earlier services to the Movement. A similar remark was noted by
Alfred Rosenberg in his diary. ‘Hitler did not want to have Rohm
shot,’ he wrote. ‘He stood at one time at my side before the People’s
Court,’ Hitler had said to the head of the Nazi publishing empire,
Max Amann.

The loss of face at having to murder his right-hand man on
account of his alleged rebellion was most likely the chief reason for
Hitler’s reluctance to order ROhm’s death. For the moment, at any
rate, he hesitated about having Rohm killed. In Berlin, meanwhile,
there was no hesitation. Immediately on return from Bad Wiessee,
Goebbels had telephoned Goring with the password ‘Kolibri’
(‘Humming Bird’), which set in motion the murder-squads in the
capital city and the rest of the country. Herbert von Bose, Papen’s
press secretary, was brutally shot down by a Gestapo hit-squad after
the Vice-Chancellery had been stormed by SS men. Edgar Jung, an
intellectual on the conservative Right and speech-writer for Papen,
in ‘protective custody’ since 25 June, was also murdered, found
dead in a ditch near Oranienburg on 1 July. Papen’s staff were
arrested. The Vice-Chancellor himself, whose murder would have

proved a diplomatic embarrassment, was placed under house-arrest.
The killing was extended to others who had nothing to do with the
leadership of the SA. Old scores were settled. Gregor Strasser was
taken to Gestapo headquarters and shot in one of the cells. General
Schleicher and his wife were shot dead in their own home. Also
among the victims was Major-General von Bredow, one of
Schleicher’s right-hand men. In Munich, Hitler’s old adversary Ritter
von Kahr was dragged away by SS men and later found hacked to
death near Dachau. In all, there were twenty-two victims in and
around Munich, mostly killed through ‘local initiative’. The blood-
lust had developed its own momentum.

Hitler arrived back in Berlin around ten o’clock on the evening of
30 June, tired, drawn, and unshaven, to be met by Goring,
Himmler, and a guard of honour. He hesitated until late the
following morning about the fate of the former SA Chief of Staff. He
was, it seems, put under pressure by Himmler and Goring to have
Rohm liquidated. In the early afternoon of Sunday 1 July, during a
garden party at the Reich Chancellery for cabinet members and
their wives, Hitler finally agreed. Even now, however, he was keen
that Rohm take his own life rather than be ‘executed’. Theodor
Eicke, Commandant of Dachau Concentration Camp, was ordered to
go to Stadelheim and offer Rohm the chance to recognize the
enormity of his actions by killing himself. If not, he was to be shot.
Along with his deputy, SS-Sturmbannfiihrer Michael Lippert, and a
third SS man from the camp, Eicke drove to Stadelheim. Rohm was
left with a pistol. After ten minutes, no shot had been heard, and
the pistol was untouched on the small table near the door of the
cell, where it had been left. Eicke and Lippert returned to the cell,
each with pistol drawn, signalled to Rohm, standing and bare-
chested, and trying to speak, that they would wait no longer, took
careful aim, and shot him dead. Hitler’s published announcement
was terse: ‘The former Chief of Staff Rohm was given the
opportunity to draw the consequences of his treacherous behaviour.
He did not do so and was thereupon shot.’

On 2 July, Hitler formally announced the end of the ‘cleansing
action’. Some estimates put the total number killed at 150-200
persons.

With the SA still in a state of shock and uncertainty, the purge of
its mass membership began under the new leader, the Hitler loyalist
Viktor Lutze. Within a year, the SA had been reduced in size by over
40 per cent. Many subordinate leaders were dismissed in
disciplinary hearings. The structures built up by Rohm as the
foundation of his power within the organization were meanwhile
systematically dismantled. The SA was turned into little more than a
military sports and training body. For anyone still harbouring
alternative ideas, the ruthlessness shown by Hitler had left its own
unmistakable message.

Outside Germany, there was horror at the butchery, even more so
at the gangster methods used by the state’s leaders. Within
Germany, it was a different matter. Public expressions of gratitude
to Hitler were not long in coming. Already on 1 July, Reichswehr
Minister Blomberg, in a statement to the armed forces, praised the
‘soldierly determination and exemplary courage’ shown by the
Fuhrer in attacking and crushing ‘the traitors and mutineers’. The
gratitude of the armed forces, he added, would be marked by
‘devotion and loyalty’. The following day, the Reich President sent
Hitler a telegram expressing his own ‘deep-felt gratitude’ for the
‘resolute intervention’ and ‘courageous personal involvement’ which
had ‘rescued the German people from a serious danger’. Much later,
when they were both in prison in Nuremberg, Papen asked Goring
whether the President had ever seen the congratulatory telegram
sent in his name. Goring replied that Otto Meissner, Hindenburg’s
State Secretary, had asked him, half-jokingly, whether he had been
‘satisfied with the text’.

Hitler himself gave a lengthy account of the ‘plot’ by Rohm to a
meeting of ministers on the morning of 3 July. Anticipating any

allegations about the lawlessness of his actions, he likened his
actions to those of the captain of a ship putting down a mutiny,
where immediate action to smash a revolt was necessary, and a
formal trial was impossible. He asked the cabinet to accept the draft
Law for the Emergency Defence of the State that he was laying
before them. In a single, brief paragraph, the law read: ‘The
measures taken on 30 June and 1 and 2 July for the suppression of
high treasonable and state treasonable attacks are, as emergency
defence of the state, legal.” The Reich Minister of Justice, the
conservative Franz Gtirtner, declared that the draft did not create
new law, but simply confirmed existing law. Reichswehr Minister
Blomberg thanked the Chancellor in the name of the cabinet for his
‘resolute and courageous action through which he had protected the
German people from civil war’. With this statement of suppliance by
the head of the armed forces, and the acceptance by the head of the
judicial system of the legality of acts of brute violence, the law
acknowledging Hitler’s right to commit murder in the interest of the
state was unanimously accepted. The law was signed by Hitler,
Frick, and Giirtner.

The account to the cabinet was in essence the basis of the
justification which Hitler offered in his lengthy speech to the
Reichstag on 13 July. If not one of his best rhetorical performances,
it was certainly one of the most remarkable, and most effective, he
was ever to deliver. The atmosphere was tense. Thirteen members
of the Reichstag had been among those murdered; friends and
former comrades-in-arms of the SA leaders were among those
present. The presence of armed SS men flanking the rostrum and at
various points of the hall was an indication of Hitler’s wariness,
even among the serried ranks of party members. After he had
offered a lengthy, fabricated account of the ‘revolt’ and the part
allegedly played in the conspiracy by General Schleicher, Major-
General Bredow, and Gregor Strasser, he came to the most
extraordinary sections of the speech. In these, the head of the
German government openly accepted full responsibility for what
amounted to mass murder. Hitler turned defence into attack.

‘Mutinies are broken according to eternal, iron laws. If I am
reproached with not turning to the law-courts for sentence, I can
only say: in this hour, I was responsible for the fate of the German
nation and thereby the supreme judge of the German people ... I
gave the order to shoot those most guilty of this treason, and I
further gave the order to burn out down to the raw flesh the ulcers
of our internal well-poisoning and the poisoning from abroad.’ The
cheering was tumultuous. Not just among the Nazi Reichstag
members, but in the country at large, Hitler’s ruthless substitution
of the rule of law by murder in the name of raison d’état was
applauded. It matched exactly what Nazi parlance dubbed the
‘healthy sentiments of the people’.

The public was ignorant of the plots, intrigues, and power-games
taking place behind the scenes. What people saw for the most part
was the welcome removal of a scourge. Once the SA had done its
job in crushing the Left, the bullying and strutting arrogance, open
acts of violence, daily disturbances, and constant unruliness of the
stormtroopers were a massive affront to the sense of order, not just
among the middle classes. Instead of being shocked by Hitler’s
resort to shooting without trial, most people — accepting, too, the
official versions of the planned putsch — acclaimed the swift and
resolute actions of their Leader.

There was great admiration for what was seen to be Hitler’s
protection of the ‘little man’ against the outrageous abuses of power
of the over-mighty SA leadership. Even more so, the emphasis that
Hitler had placed in his speech on the immorality and corruption of
the SA leaders left a big mark on public responses. The twelve
points laid down by Hitler in his order to the new Chief of Staff,
Viktor Lutze, on 30 June had focused heavily on the need to
eradicate homosexuality, debauchery, drunkenness, and high living
from the SA. Hitler had explicitly pointed to the misuse of large
amounts of money for banquets and limousines. The homosexuality
of Rohm, Heines, and others among the SA leaders, known to Hitler
and other Nazi leaders for years, was highlighted as particularly
shocking in Goebbels’s propaganda. Above all, Hitler was seen as

the restorer of order. That murder on the orders of the head of
government was the basis of the ‘restoration of order’ passed people
by, was ignored, or — most generally — met with their approval.
There were wide expectations that Hitler would extend the purge to
the rest of the party — an indication of the distance that had already
developed between Hitler’s own massive popularity and the sullied
image of the party’s ‘little Hitlers’, the power-crazed functionaries
found in towns and villages throughout the land.

There was no show of disapproval of Hitler’s state murders from
any quarter. Both Churches remained silent, even though the
Catholic Action leader, Erich Klausener, had been among the
victims. Two generals had also been murdered. Though a few of
their fellow officers momentarily thought there should be an
investigation, most were too busy clinking their champagne glasses
in celebration at the destruction of the SA. As for any sign that the
legal profession might distance itself from acts of blatant illegality,
the foremost legal theorist in the country, Carl Schmitt, published
an article directly relating to Hitler’s speech on 13 July. Its title
was: ‘The Fuhrer Protects the Law’.

The smashing of the SA removed the one organization that was
seriously destabilizing the regime and directly threatening Hitler’s
own position. The army leadership could celebrate the demise of
their rival, and the fact that Hitler had backed their power in the
state. The army’s triumph was, however, a hollow one. Its
complicity in the events of 30 June 1934 bound it more closely to
Hitler. But in so doing, it opened the door fully to the crucial
extension of Hitler’s power following Hindenburg’s death. The
generals might have thought Hitler was their man after 30 June.
The reality was different. The next few years would show that the
‘Rohm affair’ was a vital stage on the way to the army becoming
Hitler’s tool, not his master.

The other major beneficiary was the SS. ‘With regard to the great
services of the SS, especially in connection with the events of the
30th of June,’ Hitler removed its subordination to the SA. From 20
July 1934 onwards, it was responsible to him alone. Instead of any

dependence on the huge and unreliable SA, with its own power
pretensions, Hitler had elevated the smaller, élite praetorian guard,
its loyalty unquestioned, its leaders already in almost total
command of the police. The most crucial ideological weapon in the
armoury of Hitler’s state was forged.

Not least, the crushing of the SA leadership showed what Hitler
wanted it to show: that those opposing the regime had to reckon
with losing their heads. All would-be opponents could now be
absolutely clear that Hitler would stop at nothing to hold on to
power, that he would not hesitate to use the utmost brutality to
smash those in his way.

An early intimation that a head of government who had had his own
immediate predecessor as Chancellor, General von Schleicher,
murdered might also not shy away from involvement in violence
abroad was provided by the assassination of the Austrian Chancellor
Engelbert Dolfuss in a failed putsch attempt undertaken by Austrian
SS men on 25 July while Hitler was attending the Bayreuth Festival.
Hitler’s own role, and the extent to which he had detailed
information of the putsch plans, is less than wholly clear. The
initiative for the coup attempt clearly came from local Nazis.
However, it seems that Hitler was aware of it, and gave his
approval. The putsch attempt was rapidly put down. Under Kurt
Schuschnigg, successor to the murdered Dollfuss, the Austrian
authoritarian regime, treading its tightrope between the predatory
powers of Germany and Italy, continued in existence — for the
present.

The international embarrassment for Hitler was enormous, the
damage to relations with Italy considerable. For a time, it even
looked as if Italian intervention was likely. Papen found Hitler in a
near-hysterical state, denouncing the idiocy of the Austrian Nazis for
landing him in such a mess. Every attempt was made by the German
government, however unconvincingly, to dissociate itself from the

coup. The headquarters of the Austrian NSDAP in Munich were
closed down. A new policy of restraint in Austria was imposed. But
at least one consequence of the ill-fated affair pleased Hitler. He
found the answer to what to do with Papen — who had ‘just been in
our way since the Rohm business’, as Goring reportedly put it. He
made him the new German ambassador in Vienna.

In Neudeck, meanwhile, Hindenburg was dying. His condition
had been worsening during the previous weeks. On 1 August, Hitler
told the cabinet that the doctors were giving Hindenburg less than
twenty-four hours to live. The following morning, the Reich
President was dead.

So close to the goal of total power, Hitler had left nothing to
chance. The Enabling Act had explicitly stipulated that the rights of
the Reich President would be left untouched. But on 1 August, while
Hindenburg was still alive, Hitler had all his ministers put their
names to a law determining that, on Hindenburg’s death, the office
of the Reich President would be combined with that of the Reich
Chancellor. The reason subsequently given was that the title ‘Reich
President’ was uniquely bound up with the ‘greatness’ of the
deceased. Hitler wished from now on, in a ruling to apply ‘for all
time’, to be addressed as ‘Fithrer and Reich Chancellor’. The change
in his powers was to be put to the German people for confirmation
in a ‘free plebiscite’, scheduled for 19 August.

Among the signatories to the ‘Law on the Head of State of the
German Reich’ of 1 August 1934 had been Reichswehr Minister
Blomberg. The law meant that, on Hindenburg’s death, Hitler would
automatically become supreme commander of the armed forces. The
possibility of the army appealing over the head of the government
to the Reich President as supreme commander thereby disappeared.
This caused no concern to the Reichswehr leadership. Blomberg and
Reichenau were, in any case, determined to go further. They were
keen to exploit the moment to bind Hitler, as they imagined, more
closely to the armed forces. The fateful step they took, however,
had precisely the opposite effect. As Blomberg later made clear, it
was without any request by Hitler, and without consulting him, that

he and Reichenau hastily devised the oath of unconditional loyalty
to the person of the Fuhrer, taken by every officer and soldier in the
armed forces in ceremonies throughout the land on 2 August, almost
before Hindenburg’s corpse had gone cold. The oath meant that the
distinction between loyalty to the state and loyalty to Hitler had
been eradicated. Opposition was made more difficult. For those
later hesitant about joining the conspiracy against Hitler, the oath
would also provide an excuse. Far from creating a dependence of
Hitler on the army, the oath, stemming from ill-conceived ambitions
of the Reichswehr leadership, marked the symbolic moment when
the army chained itself to the Fthrer.

‘Today Hitler is the Whole of Germany,’ ran a headline on 4
August. The funeral of the Reich President, held with great pomp
and circumstance at the Tannenberg Memorial in East Prussia, the
scene of his great victory in the First World War, saw Hindenburg,
who had represented the only countervailing source of loyalty,
‘enter Valhalla’, as Hitler put it. Hindenburg had wanted to be
buried at Neudeck. Ever alert to propaganda opportunities, Hitler
insisted on his burial in the Tannenberg Memorial. On 19 August,
the silent coup of the first days of the month duly gained its ritual
plebiscitary confirmation. According to the official figures, 89.9 per
cent of the voters supported Hitler’s constitutionally now unlimited
powers as head of state, head of government, leader of the party,
and supreme commander of the armed forces. The result,
disappointing though it was to the Nazi leadership, and less
impressive as a show of support than might perhaps have been
imagined when all account is taken of the obvious pressures and
manipulation, nevertheless reflected the fact that Hitler had the
backing, much of it fervently enthusiastic, of the great majority of
the German people.

In the few weeks embracing the Rohm affair and the death of
Hindenburg, Hitler had removed all remaining threats to his
position with an ease which even in the spring and early summer of
1934 could have been barely imagined. He was now institutionally
unchallengeable, backed by the ‘big battalions’, adored by much of

the population. He had secured total power. The Ftthrer state was
established. Germany had bound itself to the dictatorship it had
created.

After the crisis-ridden summer, Hitler was, by September, once
again in his element on the huge propaganda stage of the
Nuremberg Rally. In contrast even to the previous year’s rally, this
was consciously created as a vehicle of the Fuhrer cult. Hitler now
towered above his Movement, which had assembled to pay him
homage. The film which the talented and glamorous director Leni
Riefenstahl made of the rally subsequently played to packed houses
throughout Germany, and made its own significant contribution to
the glorification of Hitler. The title of the film, devised by Hitler
himself, was Triumph of the Will. In reality, his triumph owed only a
little to will. It owed far more to those who had much to gain — or
thought they had —- by placing the German state at Hitler’s disposal.

12
Working Towards the Fuhrer

Everyone with opportunity to observe it knows that the Fiihrer can only with great
difficulty order from above everything that he intends to carry out sooner or later. On the
contrary, until now everyone has best worked in his place in the new Germany if, so to
speak, he works towards the Fiihrer.

This was the central idea of a speech made by Werner Willikens,
State Secretary in the Prussian Agriculture Ministry, at a meeting of
representatives from Lander agriculture ministries held in Berlin on
21 February 1934. Willikens continued:

Very often, and in many places, it has been the case that individuals, already in previous
years, have waited for commands and orders. Unfortunately, that will probably also be so in
future. Rather, however, it is the duty of every single person to attempt, in the spirit of the
Fihrer, to work towards him. Anyone making mistakes will come to notice it soon enough.
But the one who works correctly towards the Fihrer along his lines and towards his aim
will in future as previously have the finest reward of one day suddenly attaining the legal
confirmation of his work.

These comments, made in a routine speech, hold a key to how the
Third Reich operated. Between Hindenburg’s death at the beginning
of August 1934 and the Blomberg-Fritsch crisis in late January and
early February 1938, the Fuhrer state took shape. These were the
‘normal’ years of the Third Reich that lived in the memories of
many contemporaries as the ‘good’ years (though they were
scarcely that for the already growing numbers of victims of
Nazism). But they were also years in which the ‘cumulative
radicalization’ so characteristic of the Nazi regime began to gather
pace. One feature of this process was the fragmentation of
government as Hitler’s form of personalized rule distorted the
machinery of administration and called into being a panoply of

overlapping and competing agencies dependent in differing ways
upon the ‘will of the Fuhrer’. At the same time, the racial and
expansionist goals at the heart of Hitler’s own Weltanschauung
began in these years gradually to come more sharply into focus,
though by no means always as a direct consequence of Hitler’s own
actions. Not least, these were the years in which Hitler’s prestige
and power, institutionally unchallengeable after the summer of
1934, expanded to the point where it was absolute.

These three tendencies — erosion of collective government,
emergence of clearer ideological goals, and Fuhrer absolutism —
were closely interrelated. Hitler’s personal actions, particularly in
the realm of foreign policy, were certainly vital to the development.
But the decisive component was that unwittingly singled out in his
speech by Werner Willikens. Hitler’s personalized form of rule
invited radical initiatives from below and offered such initiatives
backing, so long as they were in line with his broadly defined goals.
This promoted ferocious competition at all levels of the regime,
among competing agencies, and among individuals within those
agencies. In the Darwinist jungle of the Third Reich, the way to
power and advancement was through anticipating the ‘Fthrer will’,
and, without waiting for directives, taking initiatives to promote
what were presumed to be Hitler’s aims and wishes. For party
functionaries and ideologues and for SS ‘technocrats of power’,
‘working towards the Fuhrer’ could have a literal meaning. But,
metaphorically, ordinary citizens denouncing neighbours to the
Gestapo, often turning personal animosity or resentment to their
advantage through political slur, businessmen happy to exploit anti-
Jewish legislation to rid themselves of competitors, and the many
others whose daily forms of minor cooperation with the regime
took place at the cost of others, were — whatever their motives —
indirectly ‘working towards the Fthrer’. They were as a
consequence helping drive on an unstoppable radicalization which
saw the gradual emergence in concrete shape of policy objectives
embodied in the ‘mission’ of the Fuhrer.

Through ‘working towards the Fuhrer’, initiatives were taken,
pressures created, legislation instigated — all in ways which fell into
line with what were taken to be Hitler’s aims, and without the
Dictator necessarily having to dictate. The result was continuing
radicalization of policy in a direction which brought Hitler’s own
ideological imperatives more plainly into view as practicable policy
options. The disintegration of the formal machinery of government
and the accompanying ideological radicalization resulted then
directly and inexorably from the specific form of personalized rule
under Hitler. Conversely, both decisively shaped the process by
which Hitler’s personalized power was able to free itself from all
institutional constraints and become absolute.

Those close to Hitler later claimed that they detected a change in
him after Hindenburg’s death. According to Press Chief Otto
Dietrich, the years 1935 and 1936, with Hitler ‘now as absolute
ruler on the lookout for new deeds’, were ‘the most significant’ in
his development ‘from domestic reformer and social leader of the
people to the later foreign-policy desperado and gambler in
international politics’. ‘In these years,’ Dietrich went on, ‘a certain
change also made itself noticeable in Hitler’s personal conduct and
behaviour. He became increasingly unwilling to receive visitors on
political matters if they had not been ordered by him to attend.
Equally, he knew how to distance himself inwardly from his
entourage. While, before the takeover of power, they had the
possibility of putting forward their differing political opinion, he
now as head of state and person of standing kept strictly out of all
unrequested political discussion ... Hitler began to hate objections
to his views and doubts on their infallibility ... He wanted to speak,
but not to listen. He wanted to be the hammer, not the anvil.’

Hitler’s increasing withdrawal from domestic politics once the
period of consolidation of power had come to an end in August
1934 was, as Dietrich’s remarks suggest, not simply a matter of
character and choice. It also directly mirrored his position as
Leader, whose prestige and image could not allow him to be
politically embarrassed or sullied by association with unpopular

policy choices. Hitler represented, and as the regime’s central
integrating mechanism had to represent, the image of national
unity. He could not be seen to be involved in internal, day-to-day
political conflict. Beyond that, his growing aloofness reflected, too,
the effective transformation of domestic politics into propaganda
and indoctrination. Choice and debate about options — the essence
of politics — had by now been removed from the public arena (even
if, of course, bitter disputes and conflicts continued behind the
scenes). ‘Politics’ within a ‘coordinated’ Germany now amounted to
what Hitler had since the early 1920s regarded as its sole aim: the
‘nationalization of the masses’ in preparation for the great and
inevitable struggle against external enemies. But this goal, the
creation of a strong, united, and impregnable ‘national community’,
was so all-embracing, so universal in its impact, that it amounted to
little more than an extremely powerful emotional incitement to
formulate policy initiatives in every sphere of the regime’s activity,
affecting all walks of life. What his form of leadership, linked to the
broad ‘directions for action’ which he embodied — national revival,
‘removal’ of Jews, racial ‘improvement’, and restoration of
Germany’s power and standing in the world — did was to unleash an
unending dynamic in all avenues of policy-making. As Willikens had
remarked, the greatest chances of success (and best opportunities
for personal aggrandizement), occurred where individuals could
demonstrate how effectively they were ‘working towards the
Fuhrer’. But since this frenzy of activity was uncoordinated — and
could not be coordinated — because of Hitler’s need to avoid being
openly drawn into disputes, it inexorably led to endemic conflict
(within the general understanding of following the ‘Fuhrer’s will’).
And this in turn merely reinforced the impossibility of Hitler’s
personal involvement in resolving the conflict. Hitler was,
therefore, at one and the same time the absolutely indispensable
fulcrum of the entire regime, and yet largely detached from any
formal machinery of government. The result, inevitably, was a high
level of governmental and administrative disorder.

Hitler’s personal temperament, his unbureaucratic style of
operating, his Darwinistic inclination to side with the stronger, and
the aloofness necessitated by his role as Fuhrer, all merged together
to produce a most extraordinary phenomenon: a highly modern,
advanced state without any central coordinating body and with a
head of government largely disengaged from the machinery of
government. Cabinet meetings (which Hitler had never liked
running) now lost significance. There were only twelve gatherings
of ministers in 1935. By 1937, this had fallen to a mere six
meetings. After 5 February 1938, the cabinet never met again.
During the war, Hitler would even ban his ministers getting
together occasionally over a glass of beer. In the absence of cabinet
discussions which might have determined priorities, a flood of
legislation emanating independently from each ministry had to be
formulated by a cumbersome and grossly inefficient process
whereby drafts were circulated and recirculated among ministers
until some agreement was reached. Only at that stage would Hitler,
if he approved after its contents were briefly summarized for him,
sign the bill (usually scarcely bothering to read it) and turn it into
law. Hans Heinrich Lammers, the head of the Reich Chancellery,
and sole link between the ministers and the Fuhrer, naturally
attained considerable influence over the way legislation (or other
business of ministers) was presented to Hitler. Where Lammers
decided that the Ftthrer was too busy with other pressing matters of
state, legislation that had taken months to prepare could simply be
ignored or postponed, sometimes indefinitely. Alternatively, Hitler
intervened, sometimes in minutiae, on the basis of some one-sided
piece of information he had been fed. The result was an increasing
arbitrariness as Hitler’s highly personalized style of rule came into
inevitable — and ultimately irreconcilable — conflict with
bureaucracy’s need for regulated norms and clearly-defined
procedures. Hitler’s ingrained secretiveness, his preference for one-
to-one meetings (which he could easily dominate) with his
subordinates, and his strong favouritism among ministers and other
leaders in party as well as state, were added ingredients that went
to undermine formal patterns of government and administration.

Access to Hitler was naturally a key element in the continuing
power-struggle within the regime. Ministers who had for some
reason fallen out of favour could find it impossible to speak to him.
Agriculture Minister Walther Darré, for instance, was in the later
1930s to attempt in vain for over two years to gain an audience
with the Fuhrer to discuss the country’s seriously worsening
agricultural problems. Though they could not hinder the access of
‘court favourites’ like Goebbels and the highly ambitious young
architect, Albert Speer — skilful in pandering to Hitler’s obsession
with building plans and a rapidly rising star in the Nazi firmament —
Hitler’s adjutants acquired a good deal of informal power through
their control of the portals of the Fuhrer.

Fritz Wiedemann, during the First World War Hitler’s immediate
superior and in the mid-1930s one of his adjutants, later recalled the
extraordinary style of his arbitrary and haphazard form of personal
rule. In 1935, commented Wiedemann, Hitler still maintained a
relatively orderly routine. Mornings, between about 10.00 a.m. and
lunch at 1.00 or 2.00 p.m., were normally taken up with meetings
with Lammers, State Secretary Meissner, Funk (from the
Propaganda Ministry) and ministers or other significant figures who
had pressing business to discuss. In the afternoons, Hitler held
discussions with military or foreign-policy advisers, though he
preferred to talk to Speer about building plans. Gradually, however,
any formal routine crumbled. Hitler reverted to the type of
dilettante lifestyle which, in essence, he had enjoyed as a youth in
Linz and Vienna. ‘Later on,’ recalled Wiedemann, ‘Hitler appeared
as a rule only just before lunch, quickly read the press summaries
provided by Reich Press Chief Dr Dietrich, then went to eat. It
became, therefore, ever more difficult for Lammers and Meissner to
acquire decisions from Hitler which he alone as head of state could
take.’ When Hitler was at his residence on the Obersalzberg, it was
even worse. ‘There he invariably left his room only approaching
2.00 p.m. Then it was lunch. The afternoon was mainly taken up
with a walk, and in the evenings, straight after the evening meal,
films were shown.’

The walks were always downhill, with a car stationed at the
bottom to ferry Hitler and his accompaniment back up again.
Hitler’s detestation of physical exercise and fear of embarrassment
through lack of athleticism remained acute. The whole area was
cordoned off during the afternoon walk, to keep away the crowds of
sightseers eager for a glimpse of the Fuhrer. Instead, the tradition
set in of the visitors’ ‘march-past’. Up to 2,000 people of all ages
and from all parts of Germany, whose devotion had persuaded them
to follow the steep paths up to the Obersalzberg and often wait
hours, marched, at a signal from one of the adjutants, in a silent
column past Hitler. For Wiedemann, the adulation had quasi-
religious overtones.

Hitler rarely missed his evening film. The adjutants had to see to
it that a fresh film was on offer each day. Hitler invariably
preferred light entertainment to serious documentaries, and,
according to Wiedemann, probably gleaned some of his strong
prejudices about the culture of other nations from such films.

In the Reich Chancellery, the company was almost exclusively
male — the atmosphere part way between that of a men’s club and
an officers’ mess (with a whiff of the gangsters’ den thrown in). On
the Obersalzberg, the presence of women (Eva Braun and wives or
lady-friends of members of Hitler’s entourage) helped to lighten the
atmosphere, and political talk was banned as long as they were
there. Hitler was courteous, even charming in a somewhat
awkwardly stiff and formal fashion, to his guests, especially towards
women. He was invariably correct and attentive in dealings with
the secretaries, adjutants, and other attendants on his personal staff,
who for the most part liked as well as respected him. He could be
kind and thoughtful, as well as generous, in his choice of birthday
and Christmas presents for his entourage. Even so, whether at the
Reich Chancellery or on the Obersalzberg, the constrictions and
tedium of living in close proximity to Hitler were considerable.
Genuine informality and relaxation were difficult when he was
present. Wherever he was, he dominated. In conversation, he would
brook no contradiction. Guests at meals were often nervous or

hesitant lest a false word incur his displeasure. His adjutants were
more concerned late at night lest a guest unwittingly lead on to one
of Hitler’s favourite topics — notably the First World War, or the
navy — where he would launch into yet another endless monologue
which they would be forced to sit through until the early hours.

Hitler’s unmethodical, even casual, approach to the flood of often
serious matters of government brought to his attention was a
guarantee of administrative disorder. ‘He disliked reading files,’
recalled Wiedemann. ‘I got decisions out of him, even on very
important matters, without him ever asking me for the relevant
papers. He took the view that many things sorted themselves out if
they were left alone.’

Hitler’s lethargy regarding paperwork knew one major exception.
When it came to preparing his speeches, which he composed
himself, he would withdraw into his room and could work deep into
the night several evenings running, occupying three secretaries
taking dictation straight into the typewriter before carefully
correcting the drafts. The public image was vital. He remained,
above all, the propagandist par excellence.

Even had Hitler been far more conscientious and less
idiosyncratic and haphazard in his style of leadership, he would
have found the highly personalized direction of the complex and
varied issues of a modern state beyond him. As it was, the doors
were opened wide to mismanagement and corruption on a massive
scale. Hitler coupled financial incompetence and disinterest with an
entirely exploitative and cavalier usage of public funds. Posts were
found for ‘old fighters’. Vast amounts of money were poured into
the construction of imposing representative buildings. Architects
and builders were lavishly rewarded. For favoured building or
artistic projects, money was no object. Leading figures in the
regime could draw upon enormous salaries, enjoy tax relief, and
benefit further from gifts, donations, and bribes to accommodate
their extravagant tastes in palatial homes, fine trappings, works of
art, and other material luxuries — including, of course, the inevitable
showy limousines. Corruption was rife at all levels of the regime.

Hitler was happy to indulge the infinite craving for the material
trappings of power and success of his underlings, aware that
corruption on a massive scale ensured loyalty as the Third Reich
developed into a modern variant of a feudal system resting on
personal allegiance rewarded by private fiefdoms. He himself, by
now a millionaire on the proceeds of sales of Mein Kampf, led his
publicly acclaimed spartan lifestyle (as regards his food and
clothing) in a context of untold luxury. Alongside his magnificent
apartments — his official one in Berlin and his private one in Munich
— the initially somewhat modest alpine residence, Haus Wachenfeld
on the Obersalzberg, was now converted at vast expense into the
grandiose Berghof, suitable for state visits of foreign dignitaries. His
restless energy demanded that he and his sizeable entourage were
almost constantly on the move within Germany. For that, a special
train with eleven coaches containing sleeping compartments, a fleet
of limousines, and three aeroplanes stood at his disposal.

Even more serious than the way corrupt party despots profited
from the bonanza of a seemingly unlimited free-for-all with public
funds was the corruption of the political system itself. In the
increasing absence of any formal procedures for arriving at political
decisions, favoured party bosses with access to Hitler were often
able, over lunch or at coffee, to put forward some initiative and
manipulate a comment of approval to their own advantage. Hitler’s
sparse involvement in initiating domestic policy during the mid- and
later 1930s and the disintegration of any centralized body for policy
formulation meant that there was wide scope for those able to exert
pressure for action in areas broadly echoing the aims of
nationalization of the masses and exclusion of those deemed not to
belong to the ‘national community’. The pressure came above all
from two sources: the party (both its central office and its provincial
bosses, the Gauleiter) and the élite organization, the SS (now
merging into the police to become an ideologically driven state
security force of immense power). Using Hitler’s professed (and
unlimited) goals of national rebirth and strength through racial

purity to legitimate their demands and actions, they ensured that
the dynamic unleashed by the takeover of power would not subside.

Once power had been attained in 1933, the NSDAP, its numbers
now rapidly swelling through the intake of hundreds of thousands
of opportunists, became in essence a loosely coordinated vehicle of
propaganda and social control. After becoming Chancellor, Hitler
had taken little interest in the party as an institution. The weak and
ineffectual, but devotedly loyal Rudolf Hefg was in April made
Hitler’s deputy in charge of the party. Since Robert Ley was left
running the party’s organizational matters, Hefg’s authority was
from the outset far from complete. Nor was Hefs in a strong
position in his dealings with the Gauleiter, most of whom could rely
on their long-standing personal bonds with Hitler to uphold their
power-base in the provinces. Neither a genuine, hierarchical
structure of command at the top of the party, nor a collective body
for determining party policy was ever instituted. The ‘Reich
Leadership’ of the party remained a group of individuals who never
met as a type of Politburo; Gauleiter conferences only took place at
Hitler’s own behest, to hear a speech from the Fuhrer, not to discuss
policy; while a party senate was never called into existence. The
party acquired, therefore, neither a coherent structure nor a
systematic policy which it could enforce upon the state
administration. Its essential nature — that of a ‘Fuhrer party’ tied to
emotively powerful but loosely-defined general aims embodied in
the person of the Fuhrer and held together by the Fuhrer cult -
ruled out both. Even so, once Hef$ was given in 1934 what
amounted to veto rights over draft legislation by government
ministers and, the following year, over the appointment of higher
civil servants, the party had indeed made significant inroads into
the purely governmental arena. The possibilities of intervention,
however unsystematic, did now increase the party’s influence,
above all in what it saw as crucial ideological spheres. Race policy
and the ‘Church struggle’ were among the most important of these.
In both areas, the party had no difficulty in mobilizing its activists,
whose radicalism in turn forced the government into legislative

action. In fact, the party leadership often found itself compelled to
respond to pressures from below, stirred up by Gauleiter playing
their own game, or emanating sometimes from radical activists at
local level. Whatever the derivation, in this way, the continuum of
radicalization in issues associated with the Fuhrer’s aims was
sustained.

By the mid-1930s, Hitler paid little attention to the workings of
the party. The dualism of party and state was never resolved — and
was not resolvable. Hitler himself welcomed the overlaps in
competence and lack of clarity. Sensitive as always to any
organizational framework which might have constrained his own
power, he undermined all attempts at ‘Reich reform’ by Frick,
aimed at producing a more rational authoritarian state structure.

Hitler’s approach to the state, as to all power-relations, was
purely exploitative and opportunistic. It was for him, as he had
expressly stated in Mein Kampf, simply a means to an end — the
vague notion of ‘upholding and advancing a community of
physically and mentally similar beings’, the ‘sustaining of those
racial basic elements which, as bestowers of culture, create the
beauty and dignity of a higher type of human being’. It followed
that he gave no consideration to forms and structures, only to
effect. His crude notion was that if a specific sphere of policy could
not be best served by a government ministry, weighed down by
bureaucracy, then another organization, run as unbureaucratically
as possible, should manage it. The new bodies were usually set up
as directly responsible to Hitler himself, and straddled party and
state without belonging to either. In reality, of course, this process
merely erected new, competing, sometimes overlapping
bureaucracies and led to unending demarcation disputes. These did
not trouble Hitler. But their effect was at one and the same time to
undermine still further any coherence of government and
administration, and to promote the growing autonomy within the
regime of Hitler’s own position as Fuhrer.

The most important, and ideologically radical, new
plenipotentiary institution, directly dependent on Hitler, was the

combined SS-police apparatus which had fully emerged by mid-
1936. Already before the ‘Rohm-Putsch’, Himmler had extended his
initial power-base in Bavaria to gain control over the police in one
state after another. After the SS had played such a key part in
breaking the power of the SA leadership at the end of June,
Himmler had been able to push home his advantage until Goring
conceded full control over the security police in the largest of the
states, Prussia. Attempts by Reich Minister of the Interior Frick and
Justice Minister Giirtner to curb autonomous police power,
expanding through the unrestricted use of ‘protective custody’ and
control of the growing domain of the concentration camps, also
ended in predictable failure. Where legal restrictions on the power
of the police were mooted, Himmler could invariably reckon with
Hitler’s backing. On 17 June, Hitler’s decree created a unified Reich
police under Himmler’s command. The most powerful agency of
repression thus merged with the most dynamic ideological force in
the Nazi Movement. Himmler’s subordination to Frick through the
office he had just taken up as Chief of the German Police existed
only on paper. As head of the SS, Himmler was personally
subordinate only to Hitler himself. With the politicization of
conventional ‘criminal’ actions through the blending of the criminal
and political police in the newly-formed ‘security police’ a week
later, the ideological power-house of the Third Reich and executive
organ of the ‘Fuhrer will’ had essentially taken shape.

The instrument had been forged which saw the realization of the
Fuhrer’s Weltanschauung as its central aim. Intensification of
radicalism was built into the nature of such a police force which
combined ruthlessness and efficiency of persecution with ideological
purpose and dynamism. Directions and dictates from Hitler were
not needed. The SS and police had individuals and departments
more than capable of ensuring that the discrimination kept
spiralling. The rise of Adolf Eichmann from an insignificant figure
collecting information on Zionism, but located in what would
rapidly emerge as a key department — the SD’s ‘Jewish Desk’ in
Berlin — to ‘manager’ of the ‘Final Solution’ showed how initiative

and readiness to grasp opportunities not only brought its rewards in
power and aggrandizement to the individual concerned, but also
pushed on the process of radicalization precisely in those areas most
closely connected with Hitler’s own ideological fixations.

In the mid-1930s this process was still in its early stages. But
pressures for action from the party in ideological concerns regarded
as central to National Socialism, and the instrumentalization of
those concerns through the expanding repressive apparatus of the
police, meant that there was no sagging ideological momentum
once power had been consolidated. And as initiatives formulated at
different levels and by different agencies of the regime attempted to
accommodate the ideological drive, the ‘idea’ of National Socialism,
located in the person of the Fuhrer, thus gradually became
translated from utopian ‘vision’ into realizable policy objectives.

The beginnings of this process were also visible in Germany’s
foreign relations. Hitler’s own greatest contribution to events with
such momentous consequences lay in his gambling instinct, his use
of bluff, and his sharp antennae for the weak spots of his opponents.
He took the key decisions; he alone determined the timing. But
little else was Hitler’s own work. The broad aims of rearmament
and revision of Versailles — though each notion hid a variety of
interpretations — united policy-makers and power-groups, whatever
the differences in emphasis, in the military and the Foreign Office.

Once Germany’s diplomatic isolation was sealed by its
withdrawal from the League of Nations, any opportunity of bilateral
agreements in eastern Europe which would prevent German
ambitions being contained by the multilateral pacts strived for by
the French was to be seized. The first indicator of such a move —
marking a notable shift in German foreign policy — was the startling
ten-year non-aggression pact with Poland, signed on 26 January
1934. Germany’s departure from the League of Nations had
intensified the mutual interest in an improved relationship. The pact

benefited Germany in undermining French influence in eastern
Europe (thereby removing the possibility of any combined Franco-
Polish military action against Germany). For the Poles, it provided
at least the temporary security felt necessary in the light of
diminished protection afforded through the League of Nations,
weakened by the German withdrawal.

Hitler was prepared to appear generous in his dealings with the
Poles. There was a new urgency in negotiations. Neurath and the
Foreign Office, initially set for a different course, swiftly trimmed
their sails to the new wind. ‘As if by orders from the top, a change
of front toward us is taking place all along the line. In Hitlerite
spheres they talk about the new Polish-German friendship,’ noted
Jézef Lipski, Polish minister to Berlin, on 3 December 1933. In
conditions of great secrecy, a ten-year non-aggression treaty was
prepared and sprung on an astonished Europe on 26 January 1934.
This early shift in German foreign policy plainly bore Hitler’s
imprint. ‘No parliamentary minister between 1920 and 1933 could
have gone so far,’ noted Ernst von Weizsacker, at that time German
ambassador in Bern.

The rapprochement with Poland meant, inevitably, a new course
towards the Soviet Union. Initially, little or nothing had altered the
modus vivendi based on mutual advantage, which, despite
deteriorating relations during the last years of the Weimar Republic,
and despite ideological antipathy, had existed since the treaties of
Rapallo in 1922, and Berlin in 1926. From summer onwards,
however, contrary to the wishes of the Foreign Office and (despite
mounting concern) of its Soviet equivalent though in line with the
clamour of the Nazi movement, diplomatic relations worsened
significantly. In autumn 1933, Hitler himself ruled out any repair of
relations. During 1934, despite the efforts of the German
ambassador Rudolf Nadolny and Soviet overtures for better
relations, the deterioration continued. Hitler himself blocked any
improvement, leading to Nadolny’s resignation. The inevitable
consequence was to push the Soviet Union closer to France, thus

enlarging the spectre of encirclement on which Nazi propaganda so
readily played.

In early 1935, the Soviet Union was still little more than a side
issue in German foreign policy. Relations with the western powers
were the chief concern. The divisions, weakness, and need to carry
domestic opinion of the western democracies would soon play into
Hitler’s hands. In the meantime, a rich propaganda gift was about to
fall into Hitler’s lap with the return of the Saar territory to Germany
through the plebiscite of 13 January 1935. The Versailles Treaty
had removed the Saarland from Germany, placing it under League
of Nations control for fifteen years, and affording France the right
to its resources. After fifteen years it was foreseen that the Saar
inhabitants — roughly half a million voters — should decide whether
they would prefer to return to Germany, become part of France, or
retain the status quo. It was always likely that the majority of the
largely German-speaking population, where resentment at the
treatment meted out in 1919 still smouldered fiercely, would want
to return to Germany. A good deal of work by the German
government prepared the ground, and as the plebiscite day
approached Goebbels unleashed a massive barrage of propaganda
directed at the Saar inhabitants and raising consciousness of the
issue at home.

The Saar territory was overwhelmingly Catholic, with a large
industrial working-class segment of the population — the two social
groups which had proved least enthusiastic about Nazism within
Germany itself. In the light of the ferocious repression of the Left
and the threatening, if still largely sporadic, persecution of the
Catholic Church that had followed the Nazi takeover in Germany,
opponents of the Hitler regime in the Saar could still harbour
illusions of a substantial anti-Nazi vote. But the Catholic authorities
put their weight behind a return to Germany. And many Saar
Catholics already looked to Hitler as the leader who would rescue
them from Bolshevism. On the Left, the massive erosion of party
loyalties had set in long before the plebiscite. For all their
propaganda efforts, the message of the dwindling number of Social

Democrat and Communist functionaries fell largely on stony
ground. Nazi propaganda had little difficulty in trumpeting the
alternative to a return to Germany: continued massive
unemployment, economic exploitation by France, and lack of any
political voice. Some concerted intimidation, as in the Reich itself
during the ‘time of struggle’, did the rest.

When the votes were counted, just under 91 per cent of the Saar’s
electorate had freely chosen dictatorship. At least two-thirds of the
former supporters of both left-wing parties had supported the return
to Germany. Any lingering doubts about whether Hitler had the
genuine backing of the German people were dispelled.

Hitler milked his triumph for all that it was worth. At the same
time, he was careful to make dove-like noises for public
consumption. He hoped, he declared, that as a consequence of the
settlement of the Saar issue, ‘relations between Germany and France
had improved once and for all. Just as we want peace, so we must
hope that our great neighbouring people is also willing and ready to
seek this peace with us’. His true thoughts were different. The Saar
triumph had strengthened his hand. He had to exploit the
advantage. Western diplomats awaited his next move. They would
not wait long.

Anxious to do nothing to jeopardize the Saar campaign, especial
caution had been deployed in rearmament, either on Hitler’s orders
or those of the Foreign Office. It could, therefore, be expected that
the demands of the armed forces leadership for acclerated
rearmament would gain new impetus following the Saar triumph.
Army leaders were divided about the tempo of expansion, but not
about its necessity or the aim of an eventual thirty-six-division
peacetime army, the size eventually determined by Hitler in March
1935. They reckoned with moving to a conscript army by summer
1935. Only the timing remained to be determined — on the basis of
the foreign-policy situation.

This had become strained again in early 1935. A joint British-
French communiqué on 3 February had condemned unilateral
rearmament, and advanced proposals for general restrictions of

arms levels and an international defence-pact against aggression
from the air. After some delay, the German response on 15
February expressed the wish for clarificatory talks with the British
government. The British Foreign Secretary Sir John Simon and Lord
Privy Seal Anthony Eden were accordingly invited for talks in Berlin
on 7 March. Three days before the planned visit, the publication of
a British Government White Book, announcing increases in military
expenditure as a result of the growing insecurity in Europe caused
by German rearmament and the bellicose atmosphere being
cultivated in the Reich, led to a furious outcry in the German press.
Hitler promptly developed a ‘diplomatic’ cold and postponed
Simon’s visit.

Three days after the visit should have taken place, on 10 March,
Goring announced the existence of a German air-force — an outright
breach of the Versailles Treaty. For effect, in comments to
diplomats, he almost doubled the numbers of aircraft actually at
Germany’s disposal at the time. Just prior to this, the French had
renewed their military treaty of 1921 with Belgium. And on 15
March the French National Assembly approved the lengthening of
the period of military service from one to two years. The moves of
the arch-enemy, France, prompted Hitler’s reaction. They provided
the pretext. Alert as ever to both the political and the propaganda
advantages to be gained from the actions of his opponents, he
decided to take the step now which in any case would soon have
been forthcoming.

On 13 March, Lieutenant-Colonel Hofsbach, Hitler’s Wehrmacht
adjutant, was ordered to present himself the next morning in the
Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten in Munich. When he arrived, Hitler was still
in bed. Only shortly before midday was the military adjutant
summoned to be told that the Fiihrer had decided to reintroduce
conscription in the immediate future — a move which would in the
eyes of the entire world graphically demonstrate Germany’s newly
regained autonomy and cast aside the military restrictions of
Versailles. Hitler expounded his reasons for two hours. The
advantageous foreign-policy situation, in which other European

states were adjusting their military strength, and especially the
measures being taken in France, were decisive. Hof$bach was then
asked what size the new army should be. Astonishingly, Hitler did
not consider directly consulting the Commander-in-Chief of the
Army, General Werner Fritsch, or the Chief of the General Staff,
Ludwig Beck, on this vital topic. It was expected that Hof$bach
would be familiar with the thinking of the military leadership.
Subject to approval from War Minister Blomberg and Fritsch,
Hofsbach stipulated thirty-six divisions. This matched the final size
of the peacetime army that the military leadership had envisaged as
a future goal. It implied an army of 550,000 men, five-and-a-half
times the size of the post-Versailles army, and a third larger than
that envisaged by Beck in a memorandum written only nine days
earlier. Hitler accepted Hofsbach’s figures without demur. What had
been meant by the army chiefs as a level to be attained only
gradually was now determined as the immediate size.

The more spectacular, the better, was always Hitler’s maxim in a
propaganda coup. Secrecy both to achieve the greatest surprise and
avoid damaging leaks that could provoke dangerous repercussions
was another. Hitler had taken his decision without consulting either
his military leaders or relevant ministers. It was the first time this
had happened in a serious matter of foreign policy, and the first
time that Hitler encountered opposition from the heads of the
armed forces. Only Hofsbach’s pleading on 14 March had persuaded
Hitler to inform Blomberg, Fritsch, and selected cabinet ministers of
what he had in store two days later. He had initially been unwilling
to disclose to them what he intended on the grounds that there
might then be a risk to secrecy. The War Minister and armed forces
leadership were astonished and appalled that Hitler was prepared to
take the step at such a sensitive juncture in foreign policy. It was
not that they disagreed with the expansion of the armed forces, or
its scale; merely that the timing and way it was done struck them as
irreponsible and unnecessarily risky. The Foreign Ministry was
more sanguine about the risks involved, reckoning the danger of
military intervention to be slight. Britain’s reaction would be

decisive. And various indicators reaching Berlin pointed to the fact
that the British were increasingly inclined to accept German
rearmament. While the military leadership recoiled, therefore,
civilian members of the cabinet welcomed Hitler’s move.

The relative calm of the other members of the cabinet evidently
helped to soothe Blomberg’s nerves. Fritsch, too, had come round to
giving his approval. His objections - remembered by Hitler years
later — were by now confined to technical problems arising from the
planned speed of rearmament.

Later that afternoon, Saturday 16 March, Hitler, with Neurath at
his side, informed foreign ambassadors of his imminent action. Then
the dramatic news was announced. Hitler proclaimed the new
Wehrmacht of thirty-six divisions, and the introduction of general
military service. Special editions of newspapers were rushed out,
eulogizing ‘the first great measure to liquidate Versailles’, the
erasing of the shame of defeat, and the restoration of Germany’s
military standing. Delirious crowds gathered outside the Reich
Chancellery cheering Hitler. The German people were completely
unprepared for what he had done. Many reacted initially with
shock, worried about the consequences abroad and possibility even
of a new war. But the mood - at least of the vast majority — rapidly
turned to euphoria when it was realized that the western powers
would do nothing. It was felt that Germany had the right to rearm,
since France had done nothing to disarm. Hitler’s prestige soared.
People admired his nerve and boldness. He had put the French in
their place, and achieved what ‘the others’ had failed to bring about
in fourteen years. ‘Enthusiasm on 17 March enormous,’ ran one
report from oppositional sources. ‘The whole of Munich was on its
feet. People can be compelled to sing, but not forced to sing with
such enthusiasm ... Hitler has again gained extraordinary ground
among the people. He is loved by many.’

Foreign governments were also taken by surprise by Hitler’s
move. French and Czech diplomacy went into overdrive. In each
case, sluggish negotiations for treaties with Moscow were speeded
up. In Italy, Mussolini made sabre-rattling noises against Germany,

provoking for a time an atmosphere resembling that of 1915, and
looked for closer alliance with France. But Great Britain held the
key. And Britain’s interests overseas in the Empire and in the
troubled Far East, alongside a prevalent concern about the threat of
Bolshevism, encouraged a more pro-German stance completely at
odds with French diplomacy and to Hitler’s direct advantage.
Without consulting the French, the British government put out on
18 March a flat, formal protest at the German unilateral action,
then, in the same protest note and to the astonishment of German
diplomats, asked whether the Reich government was still interested
in a meeting between Simon and Hitler.

Hitler was confident and self-assured when the postponed visit of
Simon and Eden eventually took place in the Reich Chancellery, on
25 March. Paul Schmidt, meeting Hitler for the first time and acting
as his interpreter, noted the cordial atmosphere at the beginning of
the talks. He had expected the ‘raging demagogue’ he had heard on
the radio, but was instead impressed by the skill and intelligence
with which Hitler conducted the negotiations. In the first morning
session of almost four hours, Simon and Eden could do no more
than pose the occasional question during Hitler’s monologues on the
menace of Bolshevism. Alongside his repeated attacks on Soviet
expansionist intentions, Hitler’s main theme was equality of
treatment for Germany in armaments levels. He insisted to Simon
on parity in air-forces with Britain and France. Asked about the
current strength of the German air-force, Hitler hesitated, then
declared: ‘We have already attained parity with Great Britain.’
Simon and Eden were sceptical, but said nothing. Nor did they when
Hitler named a ratio of 3 5 per cent of English naval strength as the
German demand, but their lack of immediate objection gave a hint
to their hosts that they were not opposed. The British had shown
themselves as pliant, willing to negotiate, insistent on upholding
peace, but ready to make concessions at the expense of solidarity
with the French. The German stance, on the other hand, had been
unyielding, inflexible on all points of substance. The courting of the
British appeared to be making headway. The post-war European

settlement was visibly crumbling. All Hitler needed to do was to
stand firm; all the signs were that the British would move to
accommodate him. The seeds of appeasement had been sown.

Though British avowals of international solidarity continued, the
much-trumpeted Stresa Front — the outcome of the meeting in Stresa
of the leaders of Britain, France, and Italy on 11 April 1935, at
which they pledged to uphold the 1925 Pact of Locarno
guaranteeing the western borders of the Reich and to support
Austria’s integrity — existed on paper only. But the isolation arising
from Stresa, the League of Nations’ condemnation of Germany, and
the French pact with the Soviet Union had to be broken. This was
the backcloth to Hitler’s second ‘peace speech’ — following that of
17 May 1933 — to the Reichstag on 21 May 1935. ‘What else could I
wish for other than calm and peace?’ he rhetorically asked.
‘Germany needs peace, and wants peace.’ He was keen to appear
reasonable and moderate while reiterating German demands for
equal rights in armament. He dismissed any hint of a threat in the
armaments programme. He wanted, he stated (as he had done
privately to Simon and Eden), no more than parity in air weaponry
and a limit of 35 per cent of British naval tonnage. He scorned press
suggestions that this would lead to a demand for the possession of
colonies. Nor had Germany any wish or capability for naval rivalry
with Great Britain. ‘The German Reich government recognizes of
itself the overwhelming necessity for existence and thereby the
justification of dominance at sea to protect the British Empire, just
as, on the other hand, we are determined to do everything
necessary in protection of our own continental existence and
freedom.’ The framework of the desired alliance with Britain had
been outlined.

The Foreign Offices of both countries were critical of schemes for
a naval accord. But the British Admiralty found the 35 per cent limit
acceptable, as long as there was no weakening of the British
position vis-a-vis the Japanese navy -— seen as the greater threat.
The British cabinet conceded. Despite the fact that Germany had
been condemned for its breach of Versailles as recently as mid-April

by the League of Nations, the British, following Hitler’s ‘peace
speech’ of 21 May, had taken up German feelers for the naval talks
in London, first mooted on Simon’s visit to Berlin in March.

Leading the German delegation, when the talks began on 4 June,
was Joachim von Ribbentrop. The linguistically able but
boundlessly vain, arrogant, and pompous former champagne
salesman had joined the party only in 1932. But with the passion of
the late convert he had from the start showed fanatical commitment
and devotion to Hitler - reminding the interpreter Schmidt, who
saw him frequently at close quarters, of the dog on the label of the
gramophone company His Master’s Voice. In 1934, as newly
appointed ‘Commissioner for Disarmament Questions’, he had been
sent by Hitler as a type of roving envoy to Rome, London, and Paris
to try to improve relations, though at the time had achieved little.
Despite his lack of obvious success, Hitler, distrustful of the career
diplomats at the Foreign Office, continued to favour him. On 1 June
1935, he was provided with the grand title of ‘Ambassador
Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary on Special Mission’. His moment
of triumph in London awaited.

The Anglo-German Naval Agreement was finally concluded on 18
June. Germany could now construct a navy of 35 per cent of the
British navy, and a submarine fleet the size of that of Britain.
Ribbentrop had covered himself with glory. Hitler had gained a
major diplomatic triumph — and experienced, he said, the happiest
day of his life. For the German people, Hitler seemed to be
achieving the unimaginable. The world, meanwhile, looked on in
astonishment. Great Britain, party to the condemnation of Germany
for breach of treaties, had wholly undermined the Stresa Front, left
its allies in the lurch, and assisted Hitler in tearing a further large
strip off the Versailles Treaty. Whether peace would be more secure
as a result already gave grave cause for doubt.

Within little over three months, European diplomacy was plunged
still further into turmoil. Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia — an
atavistic imperialist adventure designed to restore Italy’s status as a
world power and satisfy national pride and a dictator’s ambitions —

was launched on 3 October. The invasion was unanimously
condemned by the members of the League of Nations. But their
slow and half-hearted application of economic sanctions — which left
out the key commodity, oil — did little but show up once more the
League’s ineffectiveness. Divisions were once more exposed
between the two western democracies.

Mussolini’s action had plunged the League into crisis once more.
It had blasted apart the accord reached at Stresa. Europe was on the
move. Hitler could await rich pickings.

Ill

While events on the diplomatic front were turning Hitler’s way in
the spring and summer of 1935, the new wave of anti-Jewish
violence — after a relative lull since the later months of 1933 — that
swept across the land between May and September spurred further
radicalization in the area of his chief ideological obsession. Heavily
preoccupied with foreign policy at this time, Hitler was only
sporadically involved in the months before the hastily improvised
promulgation of the notorious Nuremberg Laws at the Party Rally
in September. ‘With regard to the Jews, too,’ Hitler commented at a
much later date, ‘I had for long to remain inactive.’ His inactivity
was tactical, not temperamental. ‘There’s no point in artificially
creating additional difficulties,’ he added. ‘The more cleverly you
proceed, the better.’ There was little need for him to be active. All
he had to do was provide backing for the party radicals — or, even
less, do nothing to hinder their activism (until it eventually became
counter-productive) — then introduce the discriminatory legislation
which the agitation had prompted. Knowing that actions to ‘remove’
the Jews were in line with Hitler’s aims and met with his approval
largely provided its own momentum.

Chiefly on account of foreign-policy sensitivities and economic
precariousness, the regime had during 1934 reined in the violence
against Jews which had characterized the early months of Nazi rule.
Barbarity had merely subsided — and far from totally. Ferocious

discrimination continued unabated. Intimidation was unrelenting. In
some areas, like Streicher’s Franconia, the economic boycott
remained as fierce as ever and the poisonous atmosphere invited
brutal actions. Even so, the exodus of Jews fleeing from Germany
slowed down markedly; some even came back, thinking the worst
over. Then, early in 1935 with the Saar plebiscite out of the way,
the brakes on antisemitic action began to be loosened. Written and
spoken propaganda stoked the fires of violence, inciting action from
party formations — including units of the Hitler Youth, SA, SS, and
the small traders’ organization, NS-Hago — that scarcely needed
encouragement. The Franconian Gauleiter, Julius Streicher, the
most rabid and primitive antisemite among the party leaders, was at
the forefront. Streicher’s own quasi-pornographic newspaper, Der
Stiirmer, which had never ceased dispensing its poison despite
frequent brushes even with Nazi authorities, now excelled itself in a
new and intensified campaign of filth, centring upon endless stories
of ‘racial defilement’. Sales quadrupled during 1935, chiefly on
account of the support from local party organizations.

The tone was changing at the very top. In March 1934, Hef had
banned anti-Jewish propaganda by the NS-Hago, indicating that
Hitler’s authorization was needed for any boycott. But at the end of
April 1935, Wiedemann told Bormann that Hitler did not favour the
prohibition, sought by some, of the anti-Jewish notice-boards —
‘Jews Not Wanted Here’ (or even more threatening versions) — on
the roadside, at the entry to villages, and in public places. The
notice-boards as a result now spread rapidly. Radicals at the grass-
roots gleaned the obvious message from the barrage of propaganda
and the speeches of party notables that they were being given the
green light to attack the Jews in any way they saw fit.

The party leaders were, in fact, reacting to and channelling
pressures emanating from radicals at the grass-roots of the
Movement. The continuing serious disaffection within the ranks of
the SA, scarcely abated since the ‘Rohm affair’, was the underlying
impetus to the new wave of violence directed at the Jews. Feeling
cheated of the brave new world they thought was theirs, alienated

and demoralized, the young toughs in the SA needed a new sense of
purpose. Attacking Jews provided it. Given a green light from
above, they encountered no barrier and, in fact, every
encouragement. The feeling among party activists, and especially
stormtroopers, summarized in one Gestapo report in spring 1935,
was that ‘the Jewish problem’ had to be ‘set in motion by us from
below’, and ‘that the government would then have to follow’.

The instrumental value of the new wave of agitation and violence
was made plain in reports from the Rhineland from Gauleiter Grohé
of Cologne-Aachen, who thought in March and April 1935 that a
new boycott and intensified attack on the Jews would help ‘to raise
the rather depressed mood among the lower middle classes’. Grohé,
an ardent radical in ‘the Jewish Question’, went on to congratulate
himself on the extent to which party activism had been revitalized
and the morale of the lower middle class reinvigorated by the new
attacks on the Jews.

Despite the aims of the Nazi programme, in the eyes of the
Movement’s radicals little had been done by early 1935 to eradicate
the Jews from German society. There was a good deal of feeling
among fanatical antisemites that the state bureaucracy had deflected
the party’s drive and not produced much by way of legislation to
eliminate Jewish influence. The new wave of violence now led,
therefore, to vociferous demands for the introduction of
discriminatory legislation against the Jews which would go some
way towards fulfilling the party’s programme. The state
bureaucracy also felt under pressure from actions of the Gestapo,
leading to retrospective legal sanction for police discriminatory
measures, such as the Gestapo’s ban, independently declared, in
February 1935 on Jews raising the swastika flag.

Attempts to mobilize the apathetic masses behind the violent
antisemitic campaign of the party formations backfired. Instead of
galvanizing the discontented, the antisemitic wave merely fuelled
already prominent criticism of the party. There was little
participation from those who did not belong to party formations.
Many people ignored exhortations to boycott Jewish shops and

stores. And the public displays of violence accompanying the
‘boycott movement’, as Jews were beaten up by Nazi thugs and
their property vandalized, met with wide condemnation. Not much
of the criticism was on humanitarian grounds. Economic self-
interest played a large part. So did worries that the violence might
be extended to attacks on the Churches. The methods rather than
the aims were attacked. There were few principled objections to
discrimination against Jews. What concerned people above all were
the hooliganism, mob violence, distasteful scenes, and disturbances
of order.

Accordingly, across the summer the violence became counter-
productive, and the authorities felt compelled to take steps to
condemn it and restore order. The terror on the streets had done its
job for the time being. It had pushed the discrimination still further.
The radicalization demanded action from above.

At last, Hitler, silent on the issue throughout the summer, was
forced to take a stance. Schacht had warned him in a memorandum
as early as 3 May of the economic damage being done by combating
the Jews through illegal means. Hitler had reacted at the time only
by commenting that everything would turn out all right as matters
developed. But now, on 8 August, he ordered a halt to all
‘individual actions’, which Hefs relayed to the party the following
day. On 20 August, Reich Minister of the Interior Frick took up
Hitler’s ban in threatening those continuing to perpetrate such acts
with stiff punishment. The stage had now been reached where the
state authorities were engaged in the repression of party members
seeking to implement what they knew Hitler wanted and what was
a central tenet of party doctrine. It was little wonder that the
police, increasingly compelled to intervene against party activists
engaged in violent outrages against Jews, also wanted an end to the
public disturbances. Hitler stood aloof from the fray but uneasily
positioned between the radicals and the conservatives. His instincts,
as ever, were with the radicals, whose bitter disappointment at
what they saw as a betrayal of Nazi principles was evident. But
political sense dictated that he should heed the conservatives. Led

by Schacht, these wanted a regulation of antisemitic activity
through legislation. This in any case fed into growing demands
within the party for tough discriminatory measures, especially
against ‘racial defilement’. Out of the need to reconcile these
conflicting positions, the Nuremberg Laws emerged.

Shrill demands for harsh legislation against the Jews had
mounted sharply in spring and summer 1935. Frick had appeared in
April to offer the prospect of a new, discriminatory law on rights of
state citizenship, but nothing had emerged to satisfy those who saw
a central feature of the Party Programme still not implemented
after two years of Nazi rule. Party organs demanded in June that
Jews be excluded from state citizenship and called for the death
penalty for Jews renting property to ‘aryans’, employing them as
servants, serving them as doctors or lawyers, or engaging in ‘racial
defilement’.

The issue of banning intermarriage and outlawing sexual relations
between Jews and ‘aryans’ had by this time gone to the top of the
agenda of the demands of the radicals. Racial purity, they claimed,
could only be attained through total physical apartheid. Even a
single instance of sexual intercourse between a Jew and an ‘aryan’,
announced Streicher, was sufficient to prevent the woman from ever
giving birth to a ‘pureblooded aryan’ child. ‘Defilement’ of ‘German’
girls through predatory Jews, a constant allegation of the vicious
Stiirmer and its imitators, had by now become a central theme of the
anti-Jewish agitation.

Streicher spoke in May 1935 of a forthcoming ban on marriages
between Jews and Germans. In early August, Goebbels proclaimed
that such marriages would be prohibited. Meanwhile, activists were
taking matters into their own hands. SA men demonstrated in front
of the houses of newly-weds where one partner was Jewish. Even
without a law, officials at some registry offices were refusing to
perform ‘mixed marriages’. Since they were not legally banned,
others carried out the ceremony. Still others informed the Gestapo
of an intended marriage. The Gestapo itself pressed the Justice
Ministry for a speedy regulation of the confused situation. A further

impulse arose from the new Defence Law of 21 May 1935, banning
marriage with ‘persons of non-aryan origin’ for members of the
newly-formed Wehrmacht. By July, bowing to pressure from within
the Movement, Frick had decided to introduce legislation to ban
‘mixed marriages’. Some form of draft bill had already been worked
upon in the Justice Ministry. The delay in bringing forward
legislation largely arose from the question of how to deal with the
‘Mischlinge’ — those of partial Jewish descent.

On 18 August, in a speech in Konigsberg, Schacht had indicated
that anti-Jewish legislation in accordance with the Party
Programme was ‘in preparation’ and had to be regarded as a central
aim of the government. Schacht summoned state and party leaders
two days later to the Ministry of Economics to discuss ‘the Jewish
Question’. He fiercely attacked the party’s violent methods as
causing great harm to the economy and rearmament drive,
concluding that it was vital to carry out the party’s programme, but
only through legislation. The meeting ended by agreeing that party
and state should combine to bring suggestions to the Reich
government ‘about desirable measures’.

An account of the meeting prepared for the State Secretary in the
Foreign Ministry commented:

In the main, the departmental representatives drew attention to the practical disadvantages
for their departmental work, whilst the Party justified the necessity for radical action
against the Jews with politico-emotional and abstract ideological considerations ...

For all the vehemence of his arguments, Schacht had not wanted
to, or felt able to, challenge the principle of excluding the Jews.
‘Herr Schacht did not draw the logical conclusion,’ stated the
Foreign Ministry’s report, ‘and demand a radical change in the
party’s Jewish programme, nor even in the methods of applying it,
for instance a ban on Der Sttirmer. On the contrary, he kept up the
fiction of abiding a hundred per cent by the Jewish programme.’
Schacht’s meeting had clearly highlighted the differences between
party and state, between radicals and pragmatists, between fanatics
and conservatives. There was no fundamental disagreement about
aims; merely about methods. However, the matter could not be

allowed to drag on indefinitely. A resolution had to be found in the
near future.

The minutes of the meeting were sent to Hitler, who also
discussed the matter with Schacht on 9 September. This was a day
before Hitler left to join the hundreds of thousands of the party
faithful assembled for the annual ritual in Nuremberg for the ‘Reich
Party Rally of Freedom’ — ‘the High Mass of our party’, as Goebbels
called it. It was not at that point with the intention of proclaiming
the anti-Jewish ‘citizenship’ and ‘blood’ laws during the Party Rally.
A significant part in their emergence was played by the lobbying at
Nuremberg of one of the most fanatical proponents of a ban on
sexual relations between Germans and Jews, Dr Gerhard Wagner,
the Reich Doctors’ Leader, who had been advocating a ban on
marriages between ‘aryans’ and Jews since 1933.

Two days into the Party Rally, on 12 September, Wagner
announced in a speech that within a short time a ‘Law to Protect
German Blood’ would prevent the further ‘bastardization’ of the
German people. A year later, Wagner claimed that he had no idea,
when making his announcement, that the Fihrer would introduce
the Nuremberg Laws within days. Probably Hitler had given
Wagner no specific indication of when the ‘Blood Law’ would be
promulgated. But since Wagner had unequivocally announced such a
law as imminent, he must have been given an unambiguous sign by
Hitler that action would follow in the immediate future. At any
rate, late the very next evening, 13 September, Dr Bernhard
Losener, in charge of preparation of legislation on the ‘Jewish
Question’ in the Reich Ministry of the Interior, was, to his surprise,
ordered to Nuremberg. He and a colleague, Ministerialrat Franz
Albrecht Medicus, arrived in the morning of 14 September to be
told by their superiors in the Interior Ministry, State Secretaries
Hans Pfundtner and Wilhelm Stuckart, that Hitler had instructed
them the previous day to prepare a law to regulate the problems of
marriage between ‘aryans’ and ‘non-aryans’. They had immediately
begun work on a draft. It seems likely that the urging of Wagner, in
Hitler’s company for hours at the crucial time and doubtless

supported by other Nazi leaders, had been instrumental in the
decision to bring in the long-desired law there and then. Wagner
was the link between Hitler and those given the task of drafting the
law, who were not altogether clear — since they had received no
written instructions — on exactly what came from the Doctors’
Leader and what came from Hitler himself.

The atmosphere was ripe. The summer of intimidation and
violence towards Jews had seen to that. The increasingly shrill
demands for action in the ‘Jewish Question’ formed a menacing
backcloth to the highpoint of the party’s year as hundreds of
thousands of the faithful arrived in Nuremberg, its walls, towers,
and houses bedecked by swastika banners, the air full of expectancy
at the great spectacle to follow.

Preparations for the notorious laws which would determine the
fate of thousands were little short of chaotic. Losener and Medicus
had arrived in Nuremberg on Saturday, 14 September. The specially
summoned Reichstag meeting was scheduled for 8 p.m. the
following day. There was little time for the already weary civil
servants to draft the required legislation. Whatever the prior work
on anti-Jewish legislation in the Ministries of the Interior and
Justice had been, it had plainly not passed the initial stages. No
definition of a Jew had been agreed upon. The party were pressing
for inclusion of Mischlinge (those of mixed descent). But the
complexities of this were considerable. The work went on at a
furious pace. During the course of the day, Losener was sent more
than once to battle his way through the huge crowds to Frick,
staying at a villa on the other side of the city and showing little
interest in the matter. Hitler, at Wagner’s insistence, rejected the
first versions Frick brought to him as too mild. Around midnight,
Frick returned from Hitler with the order to prepare for him four
versions of the Blood Law - varying in the severity of the penalties
for offences against the law — and, in addition, to complete the
legislative programme, to draft a Reich Citizenship Law. Within half
an hour, they had drawn up in the briefest of terms a law
distinguishing state subjects from Reich citizens, for which only

those of German or related blood were eligible. Though almost
devoid of content, the law provided the framework for the mass of
subsidiary decrees that in the following years were to push German
Jews to the outer fringes of society, prisoners in their own land. At
2.30 a.m. Frick returned with Hitler’s approval. The civil servants
learnt only when the Reichstag assembled which of the four drafts
of the ‘Blood Law’ Hitler had chosen. Possibly following the
intervention of either Neurath or, more likely, Giirtner, he had
chosen the mildest. However, he struck out with his own hand the
restriction to ‘full Jews’, adding further to the confusion by ordering
this restriction to be included in the version published by the
German News Agency. Marriage and extra-marital sexual relations
between Jews and Germans were outlawed, and to be punished
with stiff penalties. Jews were also barred from employing German
women under the age of forty-five as servants.

The Nuremberg Laws, it is plain, had been a compromise adopted
by Hitler, counter to his instincts, to defuse the anti-Jewish
agitation of the party, which over the summer had become
unpopular not merely in wide sections of the population but,
because of its harmful economic effects, among conservative
sections of the leadership. The compromise did not please party
radicals. It was a compromise, even so, which placated those in the
party who had been pressing for legislation, especially on ‘racial
defilement’. And in putting the brakes on agitation and open
violence, it had nevertheless taken the discrimination on to new
terrain. Disappointment among activists at the retreat from a direct
assault on Jews was tempered by the recognition, as one report put
it, ‘that the Fihrer had for outward appearances to ban individual
actions against the Jews in consideration of foreign policy, but in
reality was wholly in agreement that each individual should
continue on his own initiative the fight against Jewry in the most
rigorous and radical form’.

The dialectic of radicalization in the ‘Jewish Question’ in 1935
had been along the following lines: pressure from below; green
light from above; further violence from below; brakes from above

assuaging the radicals through discriminatory legislation. The
process had ratcheted up the persecution several notches.

The Nuremberg Laws served their purpose in dampening the wild
attacks on the Jews which had punctuated the summer. Most
ordinary Germans not among the ranks of the party fanatics had
disapproved of the violence, but not of the aims of anti-Jewish
policy — the exclusion of Jews from German society, and ultimately
their removal from Germany itself. They mainly approved now of
the legal framework to separate Jews and Germans as offering a
permanent basis for discrimination without the unseemly violence.
Hitler had associated himself with the search for a ‘legal’ solution.
His popularity was little affected.

The thorny question of defining a Jew had still to be tackled.
Drafts of the first implementation ordinances under the Reich
Citizenship Law, legally defining a Jew, were formulated to try to
comply with Hitler’s presumed views. But although Hitler
intervened on occasion, even on points of minute detail, his
sporadic involvement was insufficient to bring the tug-of-war
between Hels’s office and the Ministry of the Interior to a speedy
end. The Ministry wanted to classify as ‘Jews’ only those with more
than two ‘non-aryan’ grandparents. The party — with Reich Doctors’
Leader Wagner applying pressure — insisted on the inclusion of
‘quarter-Jews’. Numerous meetings brought no result. Meanwhile,
without awaiting a definition, some ministries were already
imposing a variety of discriminatory measures on those of ‘mixed’
background, using different criteria. A decision was urgently
necessary. But Hitler would not come down on one side or the
other. ‘Jewish Question still not decided,’ noted Goebbels on 1
October. ‘We debate for a long time about it, but the Fuhrer is still
wavering.’

By early November, with still no final resolution in sight, Schacht
and the Reichsbank Directorate, claiming the uncertainty was
damaging the economy and the foreign-exchange rate, joined in the
pressure on Hitler to end the dispute. Hitler had no intention of
being pinned down to accepting security of rights for Jews under

the legislation, as the Reichsbank wanted. The prospect of open
confrontation between party representatives and state ministers of
the Interior, Economics, and Foreign Affairs, and likely defeat for
the party, at a meeting scheduled for 5 November to reach a final
decision, made Hitler call off the meeting at short notice. A week
later, the First Supplementary Decree to the Reich Citizenship Law
finally ended the uncertainty. Wagner got his way on most points.
But on the definition of a Jew, the Ministry of the Interior could
point to some success. Three-quarter Jews were counted as Jewish.
Half-Jews (with two Jewish and two ‘aryan’ grandparents) were
reckoned as Jewish only if practising the Jewish faith, married
(since the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws) to a Jew, the child
of a marriage with a Jewish partner, or the illegitimate child of a
Jew and ‘aryan’. The definition of a Jew had ended with a
contradiction. For legislative purposes, it had been impossible to
arrive at a biological definition of race dependent on blood types.
So it had been necessary to resort to religious belief to determine
who was racially a Jew. As a result, it was possible to imagine
descendants of ‘pure aryan’ parents converted to Judaism who
would thereby be regarded as racial Jews. It was absurd, but merely
highlighted the absurdity of the entire exercise.

The approach of the Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen,
then the summer games in Berlin, along with the sensitive foreign-
policy situation, meant that the regime was anxious to avoid any
repetition of the violence of the summer of 1935. For the next two
years, though the wheel of discrimination carried on turning, the
‘Jewish Question’ was kept away from the forefront of politics.
When Wilhelm Gustloff, the leading NSDAP representative in
Switzerland, was assassinated by a young Jew in February 1936, the
circumstances did not lend themselves to wild retaliation. Frick, in
collaboration with HefS, strictly banned ‘individual actions’. Hitler
restrained his natural instinct, and confined himself to a relatively
low-key generalized attack on Jewry at Gustloff ’s funeral. Germany
remained quiet. The absence of violence following Gustloff ’s
murder is as clear a guide as the outrages in the anti-Jewish wave of

1935 to the fact that the regime could control, when it wanted to,
the pressures for action within the ranks of the party radicals. In
1935 it had been useful to encourage and respond to such pressures.
In 1936 it was opportune to keep them in check.

For Hitler, whatever the tactical considerations, the aim of
destroying the Jews — his central political idea since 1919 —
remained unaltered. He revealed his approach to a meeting of party
District Leaders at the end of April 1937, in immediate juxtaposition
to comments on the Jews: ‘I don’t straight away want violently to
demand an opponent to fight. I don’t say “fight” because I want to
fight. Instead, I say: “I want to destroy you!” And now let skill help
me to manoeuvre you so far into the corner that you can’t strike
any blow. And then you get the stab into the heart.’

In practice, however, as had been the position during the summer
of 1935 before the Nuremberg Rally, Hitler needed do little to push
forward the radicalization of the ‘Jewish Question’. By now, even
though still not centrally coordinated, the ‘Jewish Question’
pervaded all key areas of government; party pressure at
headquarters and in the localities for new forms of discrimination
was unceasing; civil servants complied with ever tighter constraints
under the provisions of the ‘Reich Citizenship Law’; the law-courts
were engaged in the persecution of Jews under the provisions of the
Nuremberg Laws; the police were looking for further ways to
hasten the elimination of Jews and speed up their departure from
Germany; and the general public, for the most part, passively
accepted the discrimination where they did not directly encourage
or participate in it. Antisemitism had come by now to suffuse all
walks of life. “The Nazis have indeed brought off a deepening of the
gap between the people and the Jews,’ ran a report from the illegal
socialist opposition for January 1936. ‘The feeling that the Jews are
another race is today a general one.’

Hitler, by late 1935, was already well on the way to establishing —
backed by the untiring efforts of the propaganda machine — his
standing as a national leader, transcending purely party interest. He
stood for the successes, the achievements of the regime. His
popularity soared also among those who were otherwise critical of
National Socialism. With the party, it was a different matter. The
party could be, and often was, blamed for all the continuing ills of
daily life —- for the gulf between expectations and reality that had
brought widespread disillusionment in the wake of the initial
exaggerated hopes of rapid material improvement in the Third
Reich.

Not least, the party’s image had badly suffered through its attacks
on the Christian Churches. The dismal mood in those parts of the
country worst affected by the assault on the Churches was only part
of a wider drop in the popularity of the regime in the winter of
1935-6. Hitler was aware of the deterioration in the political
situation within Germany, and of the material conditions underlying
the worsening mood of the population. Anger, especially in the
working class, was rising by autumn 1935 as a result of food
shortages, rising food-prices, and renewed growth in
unemployment.

As the domestic problems deepened, however, the Abyssinian
crisis, causing disarray in the League of Nations, presented Hitler
with new opportunities to look to foreign-policy success. He was
swiftly alert to the potential for breaking out of Germany’s
international isolation, driving a further deep wedge between the
Stresa signatories, and attaining, perhaps, a further revision of
Versailles. Given the domestic situation, a foreign-policy triumph
would, moreover, be most welcome.

Under the terms of the 1919 peace settlement, the German Reich
had been prohibited from erecting fortifications, stationing troops,
or undertaking any military preparations on the left bank of the
Rhine and within a fifty-kilometre strip on the right bank. The
status of the demilitarized Rhineland had subsequently been
endorsed by the Locarno Pact of 1925, which Germany had signed.

Any unilateral alteration of that status by Germany would amount
to a devastating breach of the post-war settlement.

The remilitarization of the Rhineland would have been on the
agenda of any German nationalist government. The army viewed it
as essential for the rearmament plans it had established in
December 1933, and for western defence. The Foreign Ministry
presumed the demilitarized status would be ended by negotiation at
some point. Hitler had talked confidentially of the abolition of the
demilitarized zone as early as 1934. He spoke of it again, in broad
terms, in summer 1935. However likely the reoccupation would
have been within the next year or two, the seizing of that
opportunity, the timing and character of the coup, were Hitler’s.
They bore his hallmark at all points.

The opportunity was provided by Mussolini. As we have noted,
his Abyssinian adventure, provoking the League of Nations’
condemnation of an unprovoked attack on a member-state and the
imposition of economic sanctions, broke the fragile Stresa Front.
Italy, faced with a pessimistic military outlook, sanctions starting to
bite, and looking for friends, turned away from France and Britain,
towards Germany. The stumbling-block to good relations had since
1933 been the Austrian question. Since the Dollfuss assassination in
mid-1934, the climate had been frosty. This now swiftly altered.
Mussolini signalled in January 1936 that he had nothing against
Austria in effect becoming a satellite of Germany. The path to the
‘Axis’ immediately opened up. Later the same month he publicly
claimed the French and British talk of possible joint military action
against Italy in the Mediterranean — not that this was in reality ever
likely — had destroyed the balance of Locarno, and could only lead
to the collapse of the Locarno system. Hitler took note. Then, in an
interview with Ambassador Hassell, Mussolini acknowledged that
Italy would offer no support for France and Britain should Hitler
decide to take action in response to the ratification of the Franco-
Soviet mutual assistance pact, currently before the French Chamber
of Deputies, and viewed by Berlin as a breach of Locarno. The

message was clear: from Italy’s point of view, Germany could re-
enter the Rhineland with impunity.

The Abyssinian crisis had also damaged Anglo-French relations,
and driven the two democracies further apart. The French
government realized that a move to remilitarize the Rhineland was
inevitable. Most observers tipped autumn 1936, once the Olympics
were out of the way. Few thought Hitler would take great risks
over the Rhineland when conventional diplomacy would ultimately
succeed. Ministers rejected independent military action against
flagrant German violation. In any case, the French military
leadership — grossly exaggerating German armed strength — had
made it plain that they opposed military retaliation, and that the
reaction to any fait accompli should be purely political. The truth
was: the French had no stomach for a fight over the Rhineland. And
Hitler and the German Foreign Office, fed intelligence from Paris,
were aware of this. Soundings had also led Hitler and von Neurath
to a strong presumption that Britain, too, would refrain from any
military action in the event of a coup. They saw Britain as for the
time being weakened militarily, preoccupied politically with
domestic affairs and with the Abyssinian crisis, unwilling to regard
the preservation of the demilitarization of the Rhineland as a vital
British interest, and possessing some sympathy for German
demands. The chances of success in a swift move to remilitarize the
Rhineland were, therefore, high; the likelihood of military
retaliation by France or Britain relatively low. That was, of course,
as long as the assessment in Berlin of the likely reactions of the
European powers was correct. Nothing was certain. Not all Hitler’s
advisers favoured the risk he was increasingly prepared to take
without delay. But Hitler had been proved right in his boldness
when leaving the League of Nations in 1933 and reintroducing
conscription in 1935. He had gained confidence. His role in the
Rhineland crisis was still more assertive, less than ever ready to
bow to the caution recommended by the military and diplomats.

Rumours were rife in Berlin at the beginning of February that
Hitler was planning to march troops into the Rhineland in the near

future. Nothing at that point had been decided. Hitler pondered the
matter while he was in Garmisch-Partenkirchen for the opening of
the Winter Olympics on 6 February. He invited objections,
particularly from the Foreign Office. During February, he discussed
the pros and cons with Neurath, Blomberg, Fritsch, Ribbentrop,
Goring, then with Hassell, the ambassador in Rome. A wider circle
within the Foreign Office and military leadership were aware of the
pending decision. Fritsch and Beck were opposed; Blomberg as usual
went along with Hitler. Foreign Minister Neurath also had grave
doubts. He thought ‘speeding up’ the action was not worth the risk.
Though it was not likely that Germany would face military
retaliation, further international isolation would be the result.
Hassell also argued that there was no hurry, since there would be
future chances to abolish the demilitarized zone. Both were of the
view that Hitler should at least await the ratification of the French-
Soviet Pact by the Senate in Paris. This, as an alleged breach of
Locarno, was to serve as the pretext. Hitler preferred to strike after
ratification by the Chamber of Deputies, without waiting for the
Senate. Whatever the caution of the career diplomats, Hitler was, as
always, egged on in the most unctuous fashion by the sycophantic
Ribbentrop.

Hitler told Hassell that the reoccupation of the Rhineland was
‘from a military point of view an absolute necessity’. He had
originally had 1937 in mind for such a step. But the favourable
international constellation, the advantage of the French-Soviet Pact
(given the anti-Soviet feeling in Britain and France) as the occasion,
and the fact that the military strength of the other powers,
especially of the Russians, was on the increase and would soon alter
the military balance, were reasons for acting sooner, not later. He
did not believe there would be military retaliation. At worst there
might be economic sanctions. At discussions on 19 February, Hassell
argued that the change for the better in Italy’s fortunes in Abyssinia
and the dropping of oil sanctions had lessened the chances of Italian
support. Hitler countered by stressing the disadvantages of delay.

‘Attack in this case, too,’ he characteristically argued — to ‘lively
assent from Ribbentrop’ — ‘was the better strategy.’

But he continued to waver. His arguments had failed to convince
the diplomats and military leaders. The advice he was receiving
favoured caution, not boldness. This was the case as late as the end
of February. However determined Hitler was on an early strike, the
precise timing still had to be decided. At lunch on 29 February, he
had yet to make up his mind.

But the following day, Sunday 1 March, with Munich bathed in
beautiful spring-like weather, Hitler turned up at the hotel where
Goebbels was staying in a good mood. The decision had been taken.
‘It’s another critical moment, but now is the time for action,’ wrote
Goebbels. ‘Fortune favours the brave! He who dares nothing wins
nothing.’

The next day, 2 March, Goebbels attended a meeting in the Reich
Chancellery at 11 a.m. The heads of the armed forces — Goring,
Blomberg, Fritsch, and Raeder — were there. So was Ribbentrop.
Hitler told them he had made his decision. The Reichstag would be
summoned for Saturday, 7 March. There the proclamation of the
remilitarization of the Rhineland would be made. At the same time,
he would offer Germany’s re-entry into the League of Nations, an
air pact, and a non-aggression treaty with France. The acute danger
would thereby be reduced, Germany’s isolation prevented, and
sovereignty once and for all restored. The Reichstag would be
dissolved and new elections announced, with foreign-policy slogans.
Fritsch had to arrange for the troop transport during Friday night.
‘Everything has to happen as quick as lightning.’ Troop movements
would be camouflaged by making them look like SA and Labour
Front exercises. The military leaders had their doubts. Members of
the cabinet were informed individually only on the afternoon of the
following day, Frick and Hef§ as late as the evening. By then,
invitations to the Reichstag had already gone out — but, to keep up
the deception, only to a beer evening. By Wednesday Hitler was
working on his Reichstag speech; Goebbels was already preparing
the election campaign. Warning voices from the Foreign Ministry

could still be registered on the Thursday. By Friday evening Hitler
had completed his speech. The cabinet met to be informed for the
first time collectively of what was planned. Goebbels announced
that the Reichstag would meet at noon the next day. The only item
on the agenda was a government declaration. Plans for the election
campaign were finalized. Workers in the Propaganda Ministry were
not permitted to leave the building overnight to prevent any leaks.
‘Success lies in surprise,’ noted Goebbels. ‘Berlin trembles with
tension,’ he added next morning.

The Reichstag, too, was tense as Hitler rose, amid enormous
applause, to speak. The deputies, all in Nazi uniform, still did not
know what to expect. The speech was aimed not just at those
present, but at the millions of radio listeners. After a lengthy
preamble denouncing Versailles, restating Germany’s demands for
equality and security, and declaring his peaceful aims, a screaming
onslaught on Bolshevism brought wild applause. This took Hitler
into his argument that the French-Soviet Pact had invalidated
Locarno. He read out the memorandum which von Neurath had
given to the ambassadors of the Locarno signatories that morning,
stating that the Locarno Treaty had lost its meaning. He paused for
a brief moment, then continued: ‘Germany regards itself, therefore,
as for its part no longer bound by this dissolved pact ... In the
interest of the primitive rights of a people to the security of its
borders and safeguarding of its defence capability, the German
Reich government has therefore from today restored the full and
unrestricted sovereignty of the Reich in the demilitarized zone of
the Rhineland.’ At this, wrote the American journalist, William
Shirer, witnessing the scene, the 600 Reichstag deputies, ‘little men
with big bodies and bulging necks and cropped hair and pouched
bellies and brown uniforms and heavy boots, little men of clay in
his fine hands, leap to their feet like automatons, their right arms
upstretched in the Nazi salute, and scream “Heil’s” ’. When the
tumult eventually subsided, Hitler advanced his ‘peace proposals’
for Europe: a non-aggression pact with Belgium and France;
demilitarization of both sides of their joint borders; an air pact; non-

aggression treaties, similar to that with Poland, with other eastern
neighbours; and Germany’s return to the League of Nations. Some
thought Hitler was offering too much. They had no need to worry.
As Hitler knew, there was not the slightest chance of his ‘offer’
proving acceptable. He moved to the climax. ‘Men, deputies of the
German Reichstag! In this historic hour when in the western
provinces of the Reich German troops are at this moment moving
into their future peacetime garrisons, we all unite in two sacred
inner vows.’ He was interrupted by a deafening tumult from the
assembled deputies. ‘They spring, yelling and crying, to their feet,’
William Shirer recorded. ‘The audience in the galleries does the
same, all except a few diplomats and about fifty of us
correspondents. Their hands are raised in slavish salute, their faces
now contorted with hysteria, their mouths wide open, shouting,
shouting, their eyes, burning with fanaticism, glued on the new god,
the Messiah. The Messiah plays his role superbly.’

Around 1.00 p.m., just as Hitler was reaching the highpoint of his
peroration, German troops approached the Hohenzollern Bridge in
Cologne. Two plane-loads of journalists, hand-picked by Goebbels,
were there to record the historic moment. Word had quickly got
round Cologne that morning. Thousands packed the banks of the
Rhine and thronged the streets near the bridge. The soldiers
received a delirious reception as they crossed. Women strewed the
way with flowers. Catholic priests blessed them. Cardinal Schulte
offered praise to Hitler for ‘sending back our army’. The ‘Church
struggle’ was temporarily forgotten.

The force to be sent into the demilitarized zone numbered no
more than 30,000 regulars, augmented by units of the
Landespolizei. A mere 3,000 men were to penetrate deep into the
zone. The remainder had taken up positions for the most part
behind the eastern bank of the Rhine. The forward troops were to
be prepared to withdraw within an hour in the event of likely
military confrontation with the French. There was no chance of this.
As we have seen, it had been ruled out in advance by French
military leaders. French intelligence — counting SA, SS, and other

Nazi formations as soldiers — had come up with an extraordinary
figure of 295,000 for the German military force in the Rhineland. In
reality, one French division would have sufficed to terminate
Hitler’s adventure. ‘Had the French then marched into the
Rhineland,’ Hitler was reported to have commented more than once
at a later date, ‘we would have had to withdraw again with our tails
between our legs. The military force at our disposal would not have
sufficed even for limited resistance.’ The forty-eight hours following
the entry of the German troops into the Rhineland were, he
claimed, the most tense of his life. He was speaking, as usual, for
effect.

The risk had, in fact, been only a moderate one. The western
democracies had lacked both the will and the unity needed to make
intervention likely. But the triumph for Hitler was priceless. Not
only had he outwitted the major powers, which had again shown
themselves incapable of adjusting to a style of power-politics that
did not play by the rules of conventional diplomacy. He had scored
a further victory over the conservative forces at home in the
military and the Foreign Office. As in March 1935 the caution and
timidity in the armed forces’ leadership and among the career
diplomats had proved misplaced. The Rhineland was the biggest
reward yet for boldness. His contempt for the ‘professionals’ in the
army and Foreign Office deepened. His boundless egomania gained
another massive boost.

The popular euphoria at the news of the reoccupation of the
Rhineland far outstripped even the feelings of national celebration
in 1933 or 1935 following previous triumphs. People were beside
themselves with delight. The initial widespread fear that Hitler’s
action would bring war was rapidly dissipated. It was almost
impossible not to be caught up in the infectious mood of joy. It
extended far beyond firm Nazi supporters. Opposition groups were
demoralized. New admiration for Hitler, support for his defiance of
the west, attack on Versailles, restoration of sovereignty over
German territory, and promises of peace were — sometimes
grudgingly — recorded by opponents of the regime.

The ‘election’ campaign that followed the Rhineland spectacular —
new elections had been set for 29 March — was no more than a
triumphant procession for Hitler. Ecstatic, adoring crowds greeted
him on his passage through Germany. Goebbels outdid himself in
the saturation coverage of his propaganda — carried into the most
outlying villages by armies of activists trumpeting the Fuhrer’s
great deeds. The ‘election’ result — 98.9 per cent ‘for the List and
therefore for the Fuhrer’ — gave Hitler what he wanted: the
overwhelming majority of the German people united behind him,
massive popular support for his position at home and abroad.
Though the official figures owed something to electoral
‘irregularities’, and a good deal more to fear and intimidation, the
overwhelming backing for Hitler — his enormous popularity now
further bolstered by the Rhineland coup — could not be gainsaid.

The Rhineland triumph left a significant mark on Hitler. The
change that Dietrich, Wiedemann, and others saw in him dated from
around this time. From now on he was more than ever a believer in
his own infallibility. A sense of his own greatness had been instilled
in Hitler by his admirers since the early 1920s. He had readily
embraced the aura attached to him. It had offered insatiable
nourishment for his already incipient all-consuming egomania. Since
then, the internal, and above all the foreign-policy successes, since
1933, accredited by growing millions to the Ftthrer’s genius, had
immensely magnified the tendency. Hitler swallowed the boundless
adulation. He became the foremost believer in his own Fuhrer cult.
Hubris — that overweening arrogance which courts disaster — was
inevitable. The point where hubris takes over had been reached by
1936.

Germany had been conquered. It was not enough. Expansion
beckoned. World peace would soon be threatened. Everything was
coming about as he alone had foreseen it, thought Hitler. He had
come to regard himself as ordained by Providence. ‘I go with the
certainty of a sleepwalker along the path laid out for me by
Providence,’ he told a huge gathering in Munich on 14 March. His
mastery over all other power-groups within the regime was by now

well-nigh complete, his position unassailable, his popularity
immense. Few at this point had the foresight to realize that the path
laid out by Providence led into the abyss.

13
Ceaseless Radicalization

To shrewd observers, it was clear: Hitler’s Rhineland coup had been
the catalyst to a major power-shift in Europe; Germany’s
ascendancy was an unpredictable and highly destabilizing element
in the international order; the odds against a new European war in
the foreseeable future had markedly shortened.

To the German public, Hitler once more professed himself a man
of peace, cleverly insinuating who was to blame for the gathering
storm-clouds of war. Speaking to a vast audience in the Berlin
Lustgarten (a huge square in the city centre) on 1 May — once an
international day of celebration of labouring people, now redubbed
the ‘National Day of Celebration of the German People’ — he posed
the rhetorical question: ‘I ask myself,’ he declared, ‘who are then
these elements who wish to have no rest, no peace, and no
understanding, who must continually agitate and sow mistrust?
Who are they actually?’ Immediately picking up the implication, the
crowd bayed: ‘The Jews.’ Hitler began again: ‘I know ...’ and was
interrupted by cheering that lasted for several minutes. When at last
he was able to continue, he picked up his sentence, though — the
desired effect achieved — now in quite different vein: ‘I know it is
not the millions who would have to take up weapons if the
intentions of these agitators were to succeed. Those are not the ones

The summer of 1936 was, however, as Hitler knew only too well,
no time to stir up a new antisemitic campaign. In August, the
Olympic Games were due to be staged in Berlin. Sport would be
turned into a vehicle of nationalist politics and propaganda as never

before. Nazi aesthetics of power would never have a wider
audience. With the eyes of the world on Berlin, it was an
opportunity not to be missed to present the new Germany’s best
face to its hundreds of thousands of visitors from across the globe.
No expense or effort had been spared in this cause. The positive
image could not be endangered by putting the ‘dark’ side of the
regime on view. Open anti-Jewish violence, such as had punctuated
the previous summer, could not be permitted. With some
difficulties, antisemitism was kept under wraps. The antisemitic
zealots in the party had temporarily to be reined in. Other
objectives were for the time being more important. Hitler could
afford to bide his time in dealing with the Jews.

The Olympics were an enormous propaganda success for the Nazi
regime. Hitler’s Germany was open to viewing for visitors from all
over the world. Most of them went away mightily impressed. Away
from the glamour of the Olympic Games and out of the public eye,
the contrast with the external image of peaceful goodwill was
sharp. By this time, the self-induced crisis in the German economy
arising from the inability to provide both for guns and butter — to
sustain supplies of raw materials both for armaments and for
consumption — was reaching its watershed. A decision on the
economic direction the country would take could not be deferred
much longer.

Already by spring 1936, it had become clear that it was no longer
possible to reconcile the demands of rapid rearmament and growing
domestic consumption. Supplies of raw materials for the armaments
industry were sufficient for only two months. Fuel supplies for the
armed forces were in a particularly critical state. Economics
Minister Hjalmar Schacht was by now thoroughly alarmed at the
accelerating tempo of rearmament and its inevitably damaging
consequences for the economy. Only a sharp reduction in living
standards (impossible without endangering the regime’s stability) or

a big increase in exports (equally impossible given the regime’s
priorities, exchange rate difficulties, and the condition of external
markets) could in his view provide for an expanding armaments
industry. He was adamant, therefore, that it was time to put the
brakes on rearmament.

The military had other ideas. The leaders of the armed forces,
uninterested in the niceties of economics but fully taken up by the
potential of modern advanced weaponry, pressed unabatedly for
rapid and massive acceleration of the armaments programme. The
army leaders were not acting in response to pressure from Hitler.
They had their own agenda. They were at the same time ‘working
towards the Fuhrer’, consciously or unconsciously acting ‘along his
lines and towards his aim’ in the full knowledge that their
rearmament ambitions wholly coincided with his political aims, and
that they could depend upon his backing against attempts to throttle
back on armament expenditure. Reich War Minister Werner von
Blomberg, Colonel-General Werner Freiherr von Fritsch,
Commander-in-Chief of the Army, and General Ludwig Beck, Chief
of the Army General Staff, were thereby paving the way, in
providing the necessary armed might, for the later expansionism
which would leave them all trailing in Hitler’s wake.

Even so, the economic impasse seemed complete. Huge increases
in allocation of scarce foreign currency were demanded by both the
Ministry of Food and the Ministry of Armaments. The position could
not be sustained. Fundamental economic priorities had to be
established as a matter of urgency. Autarky and export lobbies
could not both be satisfied. Hitler remained for months inactive. He
had no patent solution to the problem. The key figure at this point
was Goring.

Hoping to keep the party off his back, Schacht helped persuade
Hitler to install Goring at the beginning of April as Plenipotentiary
for the Securing of the Raw Materials and Foreign Exchange
Demands of the Reich. Goring’s brief was to overcome the crisis, get
rearmament moving again, and force through a policy of autarky in
fuel production. But by now Goring was in the driving-seat. Schacht

was rapidly becoming yesterday’s man. In May, shocked at the new
power-base that his own machiavellian manoeuvrings had
unwittingly helped to create for Goring, the Economics Minister
protested to Hitler. Hitler waved him away. He did not want
anything more to do with the matter, he was reported as telling
Schacht, and the Economics Minister was advised to take it up with
Goring himself. ‘It won’t go well with Schacht for much longer,’
commented Goebbels. ‘He doesn’t belong in his heart to us.’ But
Goring, too, he thought would have difficulties with the foreign-
exchange and raw-materials issue, pointing out: ‘He doesn’t
understand too much about it.’

It was not necessary that he did. His role was to throw around his
considerable weight, force the pace, bring a sense of urgency into
play, make things happen. ‘He brings the energy. Whether he has
the economic know-how and experience as well? Who knows?
Anyway, he’ll do plenty of bragging,’ was Goebbels’s assessment.

Goring soon had a team of technical experts assembled under
Lieutenant-Colonel Fritz Lob of the Luftwaffe. In the research
department of Lob’s planning team, run by the chemical firm IG-
Farben’s director Karl Krauch, solutions were rapidly advanced for
maximizing production of synthetic fuels and rapidly attaining self-
sufficiency in mineral-oil extraction. By midsummer, LOb’s planners
had come up with a detailed programme for overcoming the
unabated crisis. It envisaged a sharp tilt to a more directed economy
with distinct priorities built on an all-out drive both to secure the
armaments programme and to improve food provisioning through
maximum attainable autarky in specific fields and production of
substitute raw materials such as synthetic fuels, rubber, and
industrial fats. It was not a war economy; but it was the nearest
thing to a war economy in peacetime.

At the end of July, while Hitler was in Bayreuth and
Berchtesgaden, Goring had a number of opportunities to discuss
with him his plans for the economy. On 30 July he obtained Hitler’s
agreement to present them with a splash at the coming Reich Party
Rally in September.

Hitler had meanwhile become increasingly preoccupied with the
looming threat, as he saw it, from Bolshevism, and with the
prospect that the mounting international turmoil could lead to war
in the nearer rather than more distant future. Whatever tactical
opportunism he deployed, and however much he played on the
theme for propaganda purposes, there is no doubt that the coming
showdown with Bolshevism remained — as it had been since the
mid-1920s at the latest — the lodestar of Hitler’s thinking on foreign
policy. In 1936, this future titanic struggle started to come into
sharper focus.

After meeting the Japanese ambassador in Berlin early in June,
Hitler repeated his view that deepening conflict was on the way in
the Far East, though he now thought that Japan would ‘thrash’
Russia. At that point, ‘this colossus will start to totter. And then our
great hour will have arrived. Then we must supply ourselves with
land for 100 years,’ he told Goebbels. ‘Let’s hope we’re ready then,’
the Propaganda Minister added in his diary notes, ‘and that the
Fuhrer is still alive. So that action will be taken.’

By this time, events in Spain were also focusing Hitler’s attention
on the threat of Bolshevism. Until then, he had scarcely given a
thought to Spain. But on the evening of 25 July, his decision —
against the advice of the Foreign Office — to send aid to General
Franco committed Germany to involvement in what was rapidly to
turn into the Spanish Civil War.

On 17 July army garrisons in Spanish Morocco rose against the
elected government. The Commander-in-Chief of the army in
Morocco, General Francisco Franco, put himself next morning at the
head of the rebellion. But a mutiny of sailors loyal to the Republic
denied him the transport facilities he needed to get his army to the
mainland, most of which remained in Republican hands. The few
planes he was able to lay hands upon did not amount to much in
terms of an airlift. In these unpropitious circumstances, Franco
turned to Mussolini and Hitler. It took over a week to overcome
Mussolini’s initial refusal to help the Spanish rebels. Hitler was
persuaded within a matter of hours. Ideological and strategic

considerations — the likelihood of Bolshevism triumphing on the
Iberian peninsula — were uppermost in his mind. But the potential
for gaining access to urgently needed raw materials for the
rearmament programme — an aspect emphasized by Goring — also
appears to have played its part in the decision.

In contrast to the position of the Foreign Ministry, Hitler had
convinced himself that the dangers of being sandwiched between
two Bolshevik blocs outweighed the risks of German involvement in
the Spanish crisis — even if, as seemed likely, it should turn into
fully-blown and protracted civil war. War against the Soviet Union —
the struggle for Germany’s ‘living space’ — was, in his view, at some
point inevitable. The prospect of a Bolshevik Spain was a dangerous
complication. He decided to provide Franco with the aid requested.
It was an indication both of Hitler’s own greatly increased self-
confidence and of the weakened position of those who had advised
him on international affairs that he took the decision alone.
Possibly, knowing the reluctance of the Foreign Office to become
involved, and aware that Goring, for all his interest in possible
economic gains, shared some of its reservations, Hitler was keen to
present doubters with a fait accompli.

Only after Hitler had taken the decision were Goring and
Blomberg summoned. Goring, despite his hopes of economic gains
from intervention, was initially ‘horrified’ about the risk of
international complications through intervention in Spain. But faced
with Hitler’s usual intransigence, once he had arrived at a decision,
Goring was soon won over. Blomberg, his influence — not least after
his nervousness over the Rhineland affair —- now waning compared
with the powerful position he had once held, went along without
objection. Ribbentrop, too, when he was told on arrival in Bayreuth
that Hitler intended to support Franco, initially warned against
involvement in Spain. But Hitler was adamant. He had already
ordered aircraft to be put at Franco’s disposal. The crucial
consideration was ideological: ‘If Spain really goes communist,
France in her present situation will also be bolshevized in due
course, and then Germany is finished. Wedged between the

powerful Soviet bloc in the East and a strong communist Franco-
Spanish bloc in the West, we could do hardly anything if Moscow
chose to attack us.’ Hitler brushed aside Ribbentrop’s weak
objections — fresh complications with Britain, and the strength of
the French bourgeoisie in holding out against Bolshevism — and
simply ended the conversation by stating that he had already made
his decision.

Despite the warnings he had received that Germany could be
sucked into a military quagmire, and however strongly ideological
considerations weighed with him, Hitler probably intervened only
on the assumption that German aid would tip the balance quickly
and decisively in Franco’s favour. Short-term gains, not long-term
involvement, were the premiss of Hitler’s impulsive decision.
Significant military and economic involvement in Spain began only
in October.

The ideological impetus behind Hitler’s readiness to involve
Germany in the Spanish maelstrom — his intensified preoccupation
with the threat of Bolshevism — was not a cover for the economic
considerations that weighed so heavily with Goring. This is borne
out by his private as well as his public utterances. Publicly, as he
had told Goebbels the previous day would be the case, in his
opening proclamation to the Reich Party Rally in Nuremberg on 9
September, he announced that the ‘greatest world danger’ of which
he had warned for so long — the ‘revolutionizing of the continent’
through the work of ‘Bolshevik wire-pullers’ run by ‘an international
Jewish revolutionary headquarters in Moscow’ — was becoming
reality. Germany’s military rebuilding had been undertaken
precisely to prevent what was turning Spain into ruins from taking
place in Germany. Out of the public eye, his sentiments were hardly
different when he addressed the cabinet for three hours on the
foreign-policy situation at the beginning of December. He
concentrated on the danger of Bolshevism. Europe was divided into
two camps. There was no more going back. He described the tactics
of the ‘Reds’. Spain had become the decisive issue. France, ruled by
Prime Minister Léon Blum -— seen as an ‘agent of the Soviets’, a

‘Zionist and world-destroyer’ — would be the next victim. The victor
in Spain would gain great prestige. The consequences for the rest of
Europe, and in particular for Germany and for the remnants of
Communism in the country, were major ones. This was the reason,
he went on, for German aid in armaments to Spain. ‘Germany can
only wish that the crisis is deferred until we are ready,’ he declared.
‘When it comes, seize the opportunity. Get into the paternoster lift
at the right time. But also get out again at the right time. Rearm.
Money can play no role.’ Only two weeks or so earlier, Goebbels
had recorded in his diary: ‘After dinner I talked thoroughly with the
Fuhrer alone. He is very content with the situation. Rearmament is
proceeding. ‘We’re sticking in fabulous sums. In 1938 we’ll be
completely ready. The showdown with Bolshevism is coming. Then
we want to be prepared. The army is now completely won over by
us. Fuhrer untouchable ... Dominance in Europe for us is as good as
certain. Just let no chance pass by. Therefore rearm.’

Ill

The announcement of the Four-Year Plan at the Nuremberg Party
Rally in September had by then pushed rearmament policy on to a
new plane. Priorities had been established. They meant in practice
that balancing consumer and rearmament spending could only be
sustained for a limited period of time through a crash programme
which maximized autarkic potential to prepare Germany as rapidly
as possible for the confrontation which Hitler deemed inevitable
and other leading figures in the regime thought probable, if not
highly likely, within the following few years. Through the
introduction of the Four-Year Plan, Germany was economically
pushed in the direction of expansion and war. Economics and
ideology were by now thoroughly interwoven. Even so, the decision
to move to the Four-Year Plan was ultimately an ideological one.
Economic options were still open — even if the policies of the
previous three years meant they had already narrowed sharply.
Schacht, Goerdeler, and others, backed by important sectors of

industry, favoured a retreat from an armaments-led economy to a
re-entry into international markets. Against this, the powerful IG-
Farben lobby, linked to the Luftwaffe, pressed for maximizing
production of synthetic fuels. The stalemate persisted throughout
the summer. The economic crisis which had dogged Germany during
the previous winter and spring was unresolved. With no end to the
dispute in sight, Hitler was pressed in late August to take sides. The
preoccupation with Bolshevism, which had weighed heavily with
him throughout the summer, was decisive in his own inimitable
approach to Germany’s economic problems.

The driving-force behind the creation of what came to be known
as the Four-Year Plan was not, however, Hitler but Goring.
Following their discussions in Berchtesgaden and Bayreuth in July,
Hitler had requested reports from Goring on the economic situation,
and how the problems were to be overcome. At the beginning of
August Goring had in turn demanded memoranda from different
branches of the economy to be sent to him as rapidly as possible.
The timing was determined by propaganda considerations, not
economic criteria: the proximity of the Reich Party Rally in early
September was what counted. The complex reports could not be put
together as swiftly as Goring had wanted. By the time he travelled
to Berchtesgaden at the beginning of the last week in August, he
had only a survey from his Raw Materials and Currency staff about
the possibilities of synthetic raw-material production within
Germany to hand. He had meanwhile been encountering powerful
opposition to his economic plans from Schacht, who was voicing
feelings in some important sectors of business and industry. Carl
Goerdeler, too, Lord Mayor of Leipzig, who had served Hitler as
Reich Price Commissioner and would eventually become a leading
opponent of the regime, joined in the criticism towards the end of
the month. It was in these circumstances that Hitler was persuaded
during the last week of August to dictate a lengthy memorandum on
the future direction of the economy -— one of the extremely rare
occasions in the Third Reich (leaving aside formal laws, decrees,
and directives) that he put forward his views in writing.

The memorandum fell into two parts. The first, on ‘the political
situation’, was pure Hitler. It was couched exclusively in ideological
terms. The ‘reasoning’ was, as it had been in Mein Kampf and the
Second Book, social-Darwinist and racially determinist. ‘Politics are
the conduct and course of the historical struggle for life of peoples,’
he began. ‘The aim of these struggles is the assertion of existence.’
The world was moving towards a new conflict, centred upon
Bolshevism, ‘whose essence and aim ... is solely the elimination of
those strata of mankind which have hitherto provided the leadership
and their replacement by world-wide Jewry.’ Germany would be
the focus of the inevitable showdown with Bolshevism. ‘It is not the
aim of this memorandum to prophesy the time when the untenable
situation in Europe will become an open crisis. I only want, in these
lines, to set down my conviction that this crisis cannot and will not
fail to arrive,’ he asserted. ‘A victory of Bolshevism over Germany
would lead not to a Versailles Treaty but to the final destruction,
indeed to the annihilation, of the German people ... In face of the
necessity of defence against this danger, all other considerations
must recede into the background as being completely irrelevant.’

The second part of the memorandum, dealing with ‘Germany’s
economic situation’, and offering a ‘programme for a final solution
of our vital need’, bore unmistakable signs of Goring’s influence,
resting in turn on the raw material programmes drawn up by his
planning staff, with significant input by IG Farben. The resemblance
to statements on the economy put forward by Goring earlier in the
summer suggests that Hitler either had such statements before him
when compiling his memorandum, or that his Raw Materials
Commissar worked alongside him in preparing the memorandum.
The tone was nonetheless classically Hitlerian — down to the threat
of a law ‘making the whole of Jewry liable for all damage inflicted
by individual specimens of this community of criminals upon the
German economy’, a threat put into practice some two years later.

A temporary solution to the economic problems was to be found
in partial autarky. Maximizing domestic production wherever
possible would allow for the necessary food imports, which could

not be at the cost of rearmament. Fuel, iron, and synthetic-rubber
production had to be stepped up. Cost was irrelevant. Objections —
and the opposition voiced in the previous weeks — were taken on
board and brushed aside. The nation did not live for the economy;
rather, ‘finance and the economy, economic leaders and theories
must all exclusively serve this struggle for self-assertion in which
our people are engaged’. The Ministry of Economics had simply to
set the national economic tasks; private industry had to fulfil them.
If it could not do so, the National Socialist state, Hitler threatened,
would ‘succeed in carrying out this task on its own’. Though
Germany’s economic problems, the memorandum asserted, could be
temporarily eased through the measures laid down, they could only
finally be solved through the extension of ‘living space’. It was ‘the
task of the political leadership one day to solve this problem’. The
memorandum closed by advocating a ‘Several Years Plan’ — the term
‘Four-Year Plan’was not mentioned in the document — to maximize
self-sufficiency in existing conditions and make it possible to
demand economic sacrifices of the German people. In the next four
years, the German army had to be made operational, the economy
made ready for war.

Hitler’s way of argumentation was characteristic. The inflexibility
of its ideological premisses coupled with the very broadness of its
dogmatic generalities made it impossible for critics to contest it
outright without rejection of Hitler himself and his ‘world-view’.
This ‘world-view’, whatever tactical adjustments had proved
necessary, showed again its inner consistency in the central place
assigned to the coming showdown with Bolshevism — an issue
which, as we have seen, preoccupied Hitler throughout 1936.

Goring got what he wanted out of Hitler’s memorandum. Armed
with Hitler’s backing, he was able to determine his supremacy in
the central arena of the armaments economy. Schacht recognized
the scale of the defeat he had suffered. Hitler was reluctant to drop
him because of the standing he enjoyed abroad. But his star was
now waning fast. Alternative policies to that advanced in Hitler’s
memorandum could now be condemned out of hand.

Hitler — in so far as he had given any consideration at all to
organizational matters — had, it appears, simply imagined that
Goring would work through only a small bureaucracy and function
as an overlord in coordinating economic policy with the relevant
ministries, which would retain their specific responsibilities.
Instead, Goring rapidly improvised a panoply of ‘special
commissioners’, backed by their own bureaucratic apparatus, for
different facets of the Four-Year Plan, often without clear lines of
control, not infrequently overlapping or interfering with the duties
of the Ministry of Economics, and all of course answerable to
Goring himself. It was a recipe for administrative and economic
anarchy.

But the momentum created by the Four-Year Plan was immense.
All areas of the economy were affected in the following peacetime
years. The resulting pressures on the economy as a whole were not
sustainable indefinitely. The economic drive created its own
dynamic which fed directly into Hitler’s ideological imperative. The
ambitious technocrats in the offices and sub-organizations of the
Four-Year Plan, not least the leaders of the rapidly expanding
chemicals giant IG-Farben, were in their own way — whatever their
direct motivation — also ‘working towards the Fthrer’. Territorial
expansion became necessary for economic as well as for ideological
reasons. And racial policy, too, was pushed on to a new plane as the
spoils to be gained from a programme of ‘aryanization’ were
eagerly seized upon as easy pickings in an economy starting to
overheat under its own, self-manufactured pressures.

When Hitler drew up his memorandum in late August 1936 all
this was in the future. He had no clear notion himself of how it
would all unfold. Nor was he specially interested in such questions.
Propaganda concerned him more immediately than economics in
drawing up the memorandum. He needed the new economic
programme as the cornerstone of the Party Rally. His big speech
there on the economy was closely based, occasionally word for
word, on his August memorandum. He now spoke publicly for the
first time of a ‘new Four-Year Programme’ (recalling his initial

‘four-year plan’ put forward immediately after his appointment as
Chancellor in 1933). The designation ‘Four-Year Plan’ rapidly
caught on in the German press. It became officially so called some
weeks later, on 18 October, with Hitler’s ‘Decree for the
Implementation of the Four-Year Plan’.

In the foreign-policy arena, the shifts which had begun during the
Abyssinian crisis were hardening across the summer and autumn of
1936. Clearer contours were beginning to emerge. Diplomatic,
strategic, economic, and ideological considerations — separable but
often closely interwoven — were starting to take Germany into more
dangerous, uncharted waters. The possibility of a new European
conflagration — however unimaginable and horrifying the prospect
seemed to most of the generation that had lived through the last
one — increasingly appeared a real one.

The long-desired alliance with Britain, which had seemed a real
possibility in June 1935 at the signing of the Naval Pact, had
remained elusive. It was still a distant dream. The Abyssinian crisis
and the reoccupation of the Rhineland, now the Spanish Civil War,
had all provided hurdles to a closer relationship despite German
efforts to court those they imagined had power and influence in
Britain and some British sympathizers in high places. Ribbentrop,
appointed in the summer an unwilling Ambassador to London with a
mandate from Hitler to bring Britain into an anti-Comintern pact,
had since his triumph with the Naval Agreement become
increasingly disillusioned about the prospects of a British alliance.
Hitler saw the abdication on 11 December 1936 of King Edward
VIII, in the face of opposition in Britain to his proposed marriage to
a twice-divorced American, Mrs Wallis Simpson, as a victory for
those forces hostile to Germany. Ribbentrop had encouraged him in
the view that the King was pro-German and anti-Jewish, and that he
had been deposed by an anti-German conspiracy linked to Jews,
freemasons, and powerful political lobbies. By the end of the year,

Hitler had become more lukewarm about a British alliance.
Germany, he concluded, had its interests better served by close ties
with Italy.

The rapprochement with Italy — slow and tenuous in the first half
of 1936 — had by then come to harden into a new alliance of the
two fascist-style militaristic dictatorships dominating central and
southern Europe. The Abyssinian crisis, as we noted, had turned
Italy towards Germany. The repercussions on Austria were not long
in the waiting. Deprived de facto of its Italian protector, Austria was
swept inevitably further into the German slipstream. Encouraged by
the Italians as well as put under pressure by the Germans, Austria
was ready by 11 July 1936 to sign a wide-ranging agreement with
Germany, improving relations, ending restrictions placed upon the
German press, and upon economic and cultural activities within
Austria. Though recognizing Austrian independence, the agreement
in reality turned the Reich’s eastern neighbour into an economic and
foreign-policy dependency. It was a development which by this time
suited both Germany and Italy. And within weeks, the aid provided
by the two dictatorships to the nationalist rebels in Spain, and the
rapidly deepening commitment to the Spanish Civil War, brought
Italy and Germany still closer together.

The diplomatic benefits from closer ties with Italy were
reinforced in Hitler’s own eyes by the anti-Bolshevik credentials of
Mussolini’s regime. In September, he made overtures to Mussolini
through his envoy Hans Frank, inviting the Duce to visit Berlin the
following year — an invitation readily accepted. There was
agreement on a common struggle against Communism, rapid
recognition of a Franco government in Spain,

German recognition of the annexation of Abyssinia, and Italian
‘satisfaction’ at the Austro-German agreement.

Hitler was in effusive mood when he welcomed Mussolini’s son-
in-law, the vain Count Ciano, to Berchtesgaden on 24 October. He
described Mussolini as ‘the leading statesman in the world, to whom
none may even remotely compare himself ’. There was no clash of
interests between Italy and Germany, he declared. The

Mediterranean was ‘an Italian sea’. Germany had to have freedom
of action towards the East and the Baltic. He was convinced, he
said, that England would attack Italy, Germany, or both, given the
opportunity and likely chances of success. A common anti-Bolshevik
front, including powers in the East, the Far East, and South
America, would however act as a deterrent, and probably even
prompt Britain to seek an agreement. If Britain continued its
offensive policy, seeking time to rearm, Germany and Italy had the
advantage both in material and psychological rearmament, he
enthused. In three years, Germany would be ready, in four years
more than ready; five years would be better still.

In a speech in the cathedral square in Milan a week later,
Mussolini spoke of the line between Berlin and Rome as ‘an axis
round which all those European States which are animated by a
desire for collaboration and peace can revolve’. A new term was
coined: ‘Axis’ — whether in a positive or negative sense — caught the
imagination. In Italian and German propaganda, it evoked the might
and strength of two countries with kindred philosophies joining
forces against common enemies. For the western democracies, it
raised the spectre of the combined threat to European peace by two
expansionist powers under the leadership of dangerous dictators.

The menacing image became global when, within weeks of the
formation of the Axis, Hitler entered a further pact with the one
power outside Italy he had singled out in his August memorandum
as standing firm against Bolshevism: Japan. The driving force
behind the pact, from the German side, had from the beginning
been Ribbentrop, operating with Hitler’s encouragement. The
professionals from the German Foreign Office, far more interested
in relations with China, found themselves largely excluded, as
‘amateurs’ from the Dienststelle Ribbentrop (Ribbentrop Bureau) —
the agency for foreign affairs founded in 1934, by now with around
160 persons working for it, upon which Hitler was placing
increasing reliance — made the running.

The Japanese military leaders saw in a rapprochement with
Berlin the chance to weaken German links with China and gain a

potential ally against the Soviet Union. On 27 November 1936
Hitler approved what became known as the Anti-Comintern Pact
(which Italy joined a year later), under whose main provision — in a
secret protocol — neither party would assist the Soviet Union in any
way in the event of it attacking either Germany or Japan. The pact
was more important for its symbolism than for its actual provisions:
the two most militaristic, expansionist powers in the world had
found their way to each other. Though the pact was ostensibly
defensive, it had hardly enhanced the prospects for peace on either
side of the globe.

In his Reichstag speech on 30 January 1937, celebrating the
fourth anniversary of his takeover of power, Hitler announced that
‘the time of the so-called surprises’ was over. Germany wished ‘from
now on in loyal fashion’ as an equal partner to work with other
nations to overcome the problems besetting Europe. This
pronouncement was soon to prove even more cynical than it had
appeared at the time. That further ‘surprises’ were inevitable — and
not long postponed — was not solely owing to Hitler’s temperament
and psychology. The forces unleashed in four years of Nazi rule —
internal and external — were producing their own dynamic. Those in
so many different ways who were ‘working towards the Fuhrer’
were ensuring, directly or indirectly, that Hitler’s own ideological
obsessions served as the broad guidelines of policy initiatives. The
restlessness — and recklessness — ingrained in Hitler’s personality
reflected the pressures for action emanating in different ways from
the varied components of the regime, loosely held together by aims
of national assertiveness and racial purity embodied in the figure of
the Leader. Internationally, the fragility and chronic instability of
the post-war order had been brutally exposed. Within Germany, the
chimeric quest for racial purity, backed by a leadership for which
this was a central tenet of belief, could, if circumstances demanded,
be contained temporarily, but would inevitably soon reassert itself
to turn the screw of discrimination ever tighter. The Nazi regime
could not stand still. As Hitler himself was to comment before the
end of the year, the alternative to expansion — and to the restless

energy which was the regime’s lifeblood — was what he called
‘sterility’, bringing in its wake, after a while, ‘tensions of a social
kind’, while failure to act in the near future could bring internal
crisis and a ‘weakening point of the regime’. The bold forward
move, Hitler’s trademark, was intrinsic to Nazism itself.

To most observers, both internal and external, after four years in
power the Hitler regime looked stable, strong, and successful.
Hitler’s own position was untouchable. The image of the great
statesman and national leader of genius manufactured by
propaganda matched the sentiments and expectations of much of the
population. The internal rebuilding of the country and the national
triumphs in foreign policy, all attributed to his ‘genius’, had made
him the most popular political leader of any nation in Europe. Most
ordinary Germans -— like most ordinary people anywhere and at
most times — looked forward to peace and prosperity. Hitler
appeared to have established the basis for these. He had restored
authority to government. Law and order had been re-established.
Few were concerned if civil liberties had been destroyed in the
process. There was work again. The economy was booming. What a
contrast this was to the mass unemployment and economic failure
of Weimar democracy. Of course, there was still much to do. And
many grievances remained. Not least, the conflict with the Churches
was the source of great bitterness. But Hitler was largely exempted
from blame. The negative features of daily life, most imagined,
were not of the Fuhrer’s making. They were the fault of his
underlings, who frequently kept him in the dark about what was
happening.

Above all, even critics had to admit, Hitler had restored German
national pride. From its post-war humiliation, Germany had risen to
become once more a major power. Defence through strength had
proved a successful strategy. He had taken risks. There had been
great fear that these would lead to renewed war. But each time he

had been proved right. And Germany’s position had been
inordinately strengthened as a consequence. Even so, there was
widespread relief at the indication, in Hitler’s speech of 30 January
1937, that the period of ‘surprises’ was over. Hitler’s comment was
seized upon throughout the land as a sign that consolidation and
stability would now be the priorities. The illusion would not last
long. The year 1937 was to prove the calm before the storm.

Not only ordinary people were taken in by Hitler. Even for those
within Germany known to be critical of the regime, Hitler could in
a face-to-face meeting create a positive impression. He was good at
attuning to the sensitivities of his conversation partner, could be
charming, and often appeared reasonable and accommodating. As
always, he was a skilled dissembler. On a one-to-one basis, he could
pull the wool over the eyes even of hardened critics. After a three-
hour meeting with him at the Berghof in early November 1936, the
influential Catholic Archbishop of Munich-Freising, Cardinal
Faulhaber — a man of sharp acumen, who had often courageously
criticized the Nazi attacks on the Catholic Church — went away
convinced that Hitler was deeply religious. ‘The Reich Chancellor
undoubtedly lives in belief in God,’ he noted in a confidential
report. ‘He recognizes Christianity as the builder of western
culture.’

Few, even of those who were daily in his company — the regular
entourage of adjutants and secretaries — and those with frequent,
privileged access, could claim to ‘know’ Hitler, to get close to the
human being inside the shell of the Ftthrer figure. Hitler himself
was keen to maintain the distance. ‘The masses need an idol,’ he
was later to say. He played the role not just to the masses, but even
to his closest entourage. Despite the torrents of words he poured
out in public, and the lengthy monologues he inflicted upon those in
his circle, he was by temperament a very private, even secretive,
individual. A deeply ingrained sense of distrust and cynicism meant
he was unwilling and unable to confide in others. Behind the public
figure known to millions, the personality was a closed one. Genuine
personal relations were few. Most even of those who had been in

his immediate company for years were kept at arm’s length. He
used the familiar ‘Du’ form with a mere handful of people. Even
when his boyhood friend August Kubizek met him again the
following year, following the Anschlufg, Hitler used the formal ‘Sie’
mode of address. The conventional mode of addressing Hitler,
which had set in after 1933, ‘Mein Ftthrer’, emphasized the
formality of relations. The authority of his position depended upon
the preservation of the nimbus attached to him, as he well realized.
This in turn demanded the distance of the individual even from
those in his immediate familia. The ‘mystery’ of Hitler’s personality
had important functional, as well as temperamental, causes. Respect
for his authority was more important to him than personal warmth.

Hitler’s dealings with his personal staff were formal, correct,
polite, and courteous. He usually passed a pleasant word or two
with his secretaries when any engagements in the late morning
were over, and often took tea with them in the afternoons and at
night. He enjoyed the joking and songs (accompanied on the
accordion) of his chef and Hausintendant or major-domo Arthur
Kannenberg. He could show sympathy and understanding, as when
his new Luftwaffe adjutant, Nicolaus von Below, had — to his
embarrassment — to ask to leave for his honeymoon immediately on
joining Hitler’s service. He sent Christa Schroeder, one of his
secretaries, presents when she was ill and visited her in hospital. He
enjoyed giving presents to his staff on their birthdays and at
Christmas, and paid personal attention to selecting appropriate
gifts.

But genuine warmth and affection were missing. The shows of
kindness and attentiveness were superficial. Hitler’s staff, like most
other human beings, were of interest to him only as long as they
were useful. However lengthy and loyal their service, if their
usefulness was at an end they would be dispensed with. His staff,
for their part, admired ‘the Boss’ as they called him. They respected,
at times feared, him. His authority was unquestioned and absolute.
Their loyalty to him was equally beyond question. But whether they
genuinely liked him as a person is doubtful. There was a certain

stiffness about the atmosphere whenever Hitler was present. It was
difficult to relax in his company. He was demanding of his staff,
who had to work long hours and fit into his eccentric work habits.
His secretaries were often on duty in the mornings, but had to be
prepared to take dictation of lengthy speeches late at night or into
the early hours. Patronizingly complimentary to them on some
occasions, on others he would scarcely notice their existence. In his
own eyes, more even than in the eyes of those around him, he was
the only person that mattered. His wishes, his feelings, his interests
alone counted. He could be lenient of misdemeanours when he was
unaffected. But where he felt a sense of affront, or that he had been
let down, he could be harsh in his treatment of those around him.
He was brusque and insulting to the lady-friend, of whom he
disapproved, of his Chief Adjutant Wilhelm Briickner, a massive
figure, veteran of the SA in the party’s early days, and participant in
the Beerhall Putsch of 1923. A few years later he was peremptorily
to dismiss Brtickner, despite his lengthy and dutiful service,
following a minor dispute. On another occasion he dismissed his
valet Karl Krause, who had served him for several years, again for a
trivial matter. Even his jovial hospitality manager, Arthur
Kannenberg, who generally enjoyed something of the freedom of a
court jester, had to tread carefully. Always anxious at the prospect
of any embarrassment that would make him look foolish and
damage his standing, Hitler threatened him with punishment if his
staff committed any mistakes at receptions.

Hitler strongly disliked any change in the personnel of his
immediate entourage. He liked to see the same faces around him.
He wanted those about him whom he was used to, and who were
used to him. For one whose lifestyle had always been in many
respects so ‘bohemian’, he was remarkably fixed in his routines,
inflexible in his habits, and highly reluctant to make alterations to
his personal staff.

In 1937 he had four personal adjutants: SA-Gruppenfthrer
Wilhelm Brtickner (the chief adjutant); Julius Schaub (formerly the
head of his bodyguard, a putsch veteran who had been in prison in

Landsberg with Hitler and in his close attendance ever since,
looking after his confidential papers, carrying money for the ‘Chief
’s’ use, acting as his personal secretary, general factotum, and
‘notebook’); Fritz Wiedemann (who had been Hitler’s direct superior
in the war); and Albert Bormann (the brother of Martin, with
whom, however, he was not on speaking terms). Three military
adjutants — Colonel Friedrich Hof$bach for the army, Captain Karl-
Jesko Otto von Puttkamer for the navy, and Captain Nicolaus von
Below for the Luftwaffe —- were responsible for Hitler’s links with
the leaders of the armed forces. Secretaries, valets (one of whom
had to be on call at all moments of the day), his pilot Hans Baur, his
chauffeur Erich Kempka, the head of the SS-Leibstandarte Adolf
Hitler and long-standing Hitler trustee Sepp Dietrich, the leaders of
the bodyguard and criminal police attachments, and the doctors
who, at different times, attended upon him all formed part of the
additional personal staff.

By 1937, Hitler’s day followed a fairly regular pattern, at least
when he was in Berlin. Late in the morning, he received a knock
from his valet, Karl Krause, who would leave newspapers and any
important messages outside his room. While Hitler took them in to
read, Krause ran his bath and laid out his clothes. Always concerned
to avoid being seen naked, Hitler insisted upon dressing himself,
without help from his valet. Only towards midday did he emerge
from his private suite of rooms (or ‘Filhrer apartment’) — a lounge,
library, bedroom, and bathroom, together with a small room
reserved for Eva Braun — in the renovated Reich Chancellery. He
gave any necessary instructions to, or received information from,
his military adjutants, was given a press summary by Otto Dietrich,
and was told by Hans Heinrich Lammers, head of the Reich
Chancellery, of his various engagements. Meetings and discussions,
usually carried out while Hitler walked backwards and forwards
with his discussion partner in the ‘Wintergarten’ (or conservatory)
looking out on the garden, generally filled the next couple of hours
— sometimes longer — so that lunch was frequently delayed.

The spacious and light dining-room had a large round table with a
dozen chairs in the centre and four smaller tables, each with six
chairs, around it. Hitler sat at the large table with his back to the
window, facing a picture by Kaulbach, Entry of the Sun Goddess.
Some of the guests - among them Goebbels, Goring, and Speer —
were regulars. Others were newcomers or were seldom invited. The
talk was often of world affairs. But Hitler would tailor the
discussion to those present. He was careful in what he said. He
consciously set out to impress his opinion on his guests, perhaps at
times to gauge their reaction. Sometimes he dominated the
‘conversation’ with a monologue. At other times, he was content to
listen while Goebbels sparred with another guest, or a more general
discussion unfolded. Sometimes the table talk was interesting. New
guests could find the occasion exciting and Hitler’s comments a
‘revelation’. Frau Below, the wife of the new Luftwaffe-Adjutant,
found the atmosphere, and Hitler’s company, at first exhilarating
and was greatly impressed by his knowledge of history and art. But
for the household staff who had heard it all many times, the midday
meal was often a tedious affair.

After lunch there were usually further meetings in the Music
Salon with ambassadors, generals, Reich Ministers, foreign
dignitaries, or personal acquaintances such as the Wagners or
Bruckmanns. Such meetings seldom lasted longer than an hour, and
were arranged around tea. Thereafter, Hitler withdrew to his own
rooms for a rest, or went for a stroll round the park attached to the
Reich Chancellery. He spent no time at all during the day at his
massive desk, other than hurriedly to attach his signature to laws,
letters of appointment, or other formal documents placed before
him. Beyond his major speeches, letters to foreign heads of state,
and the occasional formal note of thanks or condolence, he dictated
little or nothing to his secretaries. Apart from his temperamental
aversion to bureaucracy, he was anxious to avoid committing
himself on paper. The consequence was that his adjutants and
personal staff often had the task of passing on in written form
directives which were unclear, ill thought-out, or spontaneous

reactions. The scope for confusion, distortion, and misunderstanding
was enormous. What Hitler had originally intended or stated was,
by the time it had passed through various hands, often open to
different interpretation and impossible to reconstruct with certainty.

The evening meal, around 8 p.m., followed the same pattern as
lunch, but there were usually fewer present and talk focused more
on Hitler’s favourite topics, such as art and history. During the
meal, Hitler would be presented by one of the servants (most of
whom were drawn from his bodyguard, the Leibstandarte) with a
list of films, including those from abroad and German films still
unreleased, which Goebbels had provided. (Hitler was delighted at
his Christmas present from Goebbels in 1937: thirty feature films of
the previous four years, and eighteen Mickey Mouse cartoons.)
After the meal, the film chosen for the evening would be shown in
the Music Salon. Any members of the household staff and the
chauffeurs of any guests present could watch. Hitler’s secretaries
were, however, not present at the meals in the Reich Chancellery,
though they were included in the more relaxed atmosphere at the
Berghof. The evening ended with conversation stretching usually to
about 2 a.m. before Hitler retired.

In this world within the Reich Chancellery, with its fixed routines
and formalities, where he was surrounded by his regular staff and
otherwise met for the most part official visitors or guests who were
mainly in awe of him, Hitler was cocooned within the role and
image of the Fuhrer which had elevated him to demi-god status.
Few could behave naturally in his presence. The rough ‘old fighters’
of the party’s early days now came less frequently. Those attending
the meals in the Reich Chancellery had for the most part only
known him since the nimbus of the ‘great leader’ had become
attached to him. The result only reinforced Hitler’s self-belief that
he was a ‘man of destiny’, treading his path ‘with the certainty of a
sleepwalker’. At the same time, he was ever more cut off from real
human contact, isolated in his realm of increasing megalomania.
Aways glad to get away from Berlin, it was only while staying with
the Wagners during the annual Bayreuth Festival and at his alpine

retreat ‘on the mountain’ above Berchtesgaden that Hitler relaxed
somewhat. But even at the Berghof, rituals were preserved. Hitler
dominated the entire existence of his guests there too. Real
informality was as good as impossible in his presence. And Hitler,
for all the large numbers of people in attendance on him and paying
court to him, remained impoverished when it came to real contact,
cut off from any meaningful personal relationship through the
shallowness of his emotions and his profoundly egocentric,
exploitative attitude towards all other human beings.

It is impossible to be sure of what, if any, emotional satisfaction
Hitler gained from his relationship with Eva Braun (whom he had
first met in 1929 when, then aged seventeen, she worked in the
office of his photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann). It could not have
been much. For prestige reasons, he kept her away from the public
eye. On the rare occasions she was in Berlin, she was closeted in her
little room in the ‘Fuhrer Apartment’ while Hitler attended official
functions or was otherwise engaged. Even in his close circle she was
not permitted to be present for meals if any important guests were
there. She did not accompany Hitler on his numerous journeys, and
had to stay for the most part either in his flat in Munich or at the
Berghof, the only place where she could emerge as one of the
extended ‘family’. Even there, however, she was hidden away
during receptions for important guests. Hitler often treated her
abysmally when she was present, frequently humiliating her in front
of others. The contrast with the olde-worlde charm — kissing hands,
linking arms, cupping elbows - that he habitually showed towards
pretty women in his presence merely rubbed salt in the wounds.

Probably the closest that Hitler came to friendship was in his
relations with Joseph Goebbels and, increasingly, with his court
architect and new favourite, Albert Speer, whom in January 1937
he made responsible for the rebuilding of Berlin. Hitler frequently
sought out their company, liked their presence, was fond of their
wives and families, and could feel at ease with them. The Goebbels
home was a frequent refuge in Berlin. Lengthy talks with Speer
about the rebuilding of the capital city amounted to the nearest

thing Hitler had to a hobby, a welcome respite from his otherwise
total involvement in politics. At least in Goebbels’s case there were
elements of a father-son relationship. A rare flicker of human
concern could be glimpsed when Hitler asked Goebbels to stay for
an extra day in Nuremberg after the rally in September 1937, since
(according to the Propaganda Minister) he did not like him flying at
night. Hitler was the dominant figure — the father-figure. But he
may have seen something of himself in each of his two protégés —
the brilliant progagandist in Goebbels, the gifted architect in Speer.

In the case of Speer, the fascination for architecture provided an
obvious bond. Both had a liking for neo-classical buildings on a
monumental scale. Hitler was impressed by Speer’s taste in
architecture, his energy, and his organizational skill. He had rapidly
come to see him as the architect who could put his own grandiose
building schemes, envisaged as the representation of Teutonic might
and glory that would last for centuries, into practice. But other
architects, some better than Speer, were available. The
attractiveness of Speer to Hitler went beyond the building mania
that linked them closely to each other. Nothing homoerotic was
involved — at least not consciously. But Hitler perhaps found in the
handsome, burningly ambitious, talented, and successful architect
an unconsciously idealized self-image. What is plain is that both
Goebbels and Speer worshipped Hitler. Goebbels’s adoration of the
father-figure Hitler was undiminished since the mid-1920s. ‘He is a
fabulous man’ was merely one of his effusions of sentiment in 1937
about the figure who was the centre-point of his universe. For
Speer, as he himself later recognized, his love of Hitler transcended
the power-ambitions that his protector and role-model was able to
satisfy — even if it originally arose out of them and could never be
completely separated from them.

In earlier years, Hitler had invariably spoken of his own ‘mission’
as the mere beginning of Germany’s passage to world domination.
The whole process would take generations to complete. But, flushed
with scarcely imaginable triumphs since 1933 and falling ever more

victim to the myth of his own greatness, he became increasingly
impatient to see his ‘mission’ fulfilled in his lifetime.

Partly, this was incipient megalomania. He spoke on numerous
occasions in 1937 about building plans of staggering
monumentality. At midnight on his birthday, he, Goebbels, and
Speer stood in front of plans for rebuilding Berlin, fantasizing about
a glorious future. ‘The Fuhrer won’t speak of money. Build, build! It
will somehow be paid for!’ Goebbels has him saying. ‘Frederick the
Great didn’t ask about money when he built Sanssouci.’

In part, too, it was prompted by Hitler’s growing preoccupation
with his own mortality and impatience to achieve what he could in
his lifetime. Before the mid-1930s, his health had generally been
good — astonishingly so given his lack of exercise, poor diet (even
before his cranky vegetarianism following the death in 1931 of his
niece, Geli Raubal), and high expenditure of nervous energy.
However, he already suffered from chronic stomach pains which, at
times of stress, became acute spasms. A patent medicine he took —
an old trench remedy with a base in gun-cleaning oil — turned out to
be mildly poisonous, causing headaches, double vision, dizziness,
and ringing in the ears. He had been worried in 1935 that a polyp in
his throat (eventually removed in the May of that year) was
cancerous. It turned out to be harmless. During 1936, a year of
almost continual tension, the stomach cramps were frequently
severe, and Hitler also developed eczema on both legs, which had to
be covered in bandages. At Christmas 1936, he asked Dr Theodor
Morell, a physician who had successfully treated his photographer
Heinrich Hoffmann, to try to cure him. Morell gave him vitamins
and a new patent remedy for intestinal problems. Goebbels
mentioned in June, and again in August 1937, that Hitler was
unwell. But by September, Morell’s treatment had apparently made
a difference. At any rate, Hitler was impressed. He felt fit again, his
weight was back to normal, and his eczema had vanished. His belief
in Morell would last down to the bunker in 1945. From late 1937
onwards, his increasing hypochondria made him ever more reliant
on Morell’s pills, drugs, and injections. And the fear of cancer

(which had caused his mother’s death) never left him. At the end of
October, he told a meeting of propaganda leaders that both his
parents had died young, and that he probably did not have long to
live. ‘It was necessary, therefore, to solve the problems that had to
be solved (living space) as soon as possible, so that this could still
take place in his lifetime. Later generations would no longer be able
to accomplish it. Only his person was in the position to bring it
about.’

Hitler was seldom out of the public eye in 1937. No opportunity
was missed to drive home to the German public an apparently
endless array of scarcely credible ‘achievements’ at home and the
glories of his major ‘triumphs’ in foreign policy. Flushed with
success and certain of the adulation of the masses, he wanted to be
seen. The bonds between the Fuhrer and the people — the cement of
the regime, and dependent upon recurring success and achievement
— were thereby reinforced. And for Hitler the ecstasy of his mass
audiences provided each time a new injection of the drug to feed his
egomania. As always, the effect of his speeches depended heavily
upon the atmosphere in which they were held. The content was
repetitive and monotonous. The themes were the familiar ones. Past
achievements were lauded, grandiose future plans proclaimed, the
horrors and menace of Bolshevism emphasized. But there was no
conflict between propaganda and ideology. Hitler believed what he
was saying.

His lengthy concluding speech at the Reich Party Rally in
Nuremberg in early September was an onslaught on ‘Jewish
Bolshevism’. In passages at times reminiscent of Mein Kampf, and in
his fiercest public attack on the Jews for many months, he
portrayed them as the force behind Bolshevism and its ‘general
attack on the present-day social order’, and spoke of ‘the claim of an
uncivilized Jewish-Bolshevik international guild of criminals to rule
Germany, as an old cultural land of Europe, from Moscow’. This is
what the party faithful wanted to hear. But it was far more than
window-dressing. Even in private, dictating the speeches to his
secretary, when it came to passages on Bolshevism Hitler, red-faced

and eyes blazing, would work himself to a frenzy, bellowing at full
volume his thunderous denunciations.

Away from the continual propaganda activity revolving around
speeches and public appearances, Hitler was largely preoccupied in
1937 with keeping a watchful eye on the changing situation in
world affairs and with his gigantic building plans. The continuing
conflict with both the Catholic and Protestant Churches, radical
though his own instincts were, amounted to a recurrent irritation,
especially in the first months of the year, rather than a priority
concern (as it was with Goebbels, Rosenberg, and many of the party
rank-and-file). With regard to the ‘Jewish Question’— to go from the
many private discussions with Goebbels which the Propaganda
Minister reported in his diary notes — Hitler, unchanged though his
views were, showed little active interest and seldom spoke directly
on the subject. But however uninvolved he was, the radicalization
of the regime continued unabated, forced on in a variety of ways by
party activists, ministerial bureaucracy, economic opportunists, and,
not least, by an ideologically driven police.

In February 1937 Hitler made it plain to his inner circle that he
did not want a ‘Church struggle’ at this juncture. The time was not
ripe for it. He expected ‘the great world struggle in a few years’
time’. If Germany lost one more war, it would mean the end. The
implication was clear: calm should be restored for the time being in
relations with the Churches. Instead, the conflict with the Christian
Churches intensified. The anti-clericalism and anti-Church
sentiments of the grass-roots party activists simply could not be
eradicated. The activists could draw on the verbal violence of party
leaders towards the Churches for their encouragement. Goebbels’s
orchestrated attacks on the clergy through the staged ‘immorality
trials’ of Franciscans in 1937 — following usually trumped-up or
grossly exaggerated allegations of sexual impropriety in the
religious orders — provided further ammunition. And, in turn,

however much Hitler on some occasions claimed to want a respite
in the conflict, his own inflammatory comments gave his immediate
underlings all the licence they needed to turn up the heat in the
‘Church struggle’, confident that they were ‘working towards the
Fuhrer’.

Hitler’s impatience with the Churches prompted frequent
outbursts of hostility. In early 1937, he was declaring that
‘Christianity was ripe for destruction’, and that the Churches must
yield to the ‘primacy of the state’, railing against any compromise
with ‘the most horrible institution imaginable’. In April, Goebbels
reported with satisfaction that the Fuhrer was becoming more
radical in the ‘Church Question’, and had approved the start of the
‘immorality trials’ against clergy. Goebbels noted Hitler’s verbal
attacks on the clergy and his satisfaction with the propaganda
campaign on several subsequent occasions over the following few
weeks. But Hitler was happy to leave the Propaganda Minister and
others to make the running. If Goebbels’s diary entries are a guide,
Hitler’s interest and direct involvement in the ‘Church struggle’
declined during the second half of the year. Other matters were by
now occupying his attention.

The ‘Jewish Question’ does not appear to have figured
prominently among them. Goebbels, who saw Hitler almost on a
daily basis at this time and who noted the topics of many private
conversations they had together, recorded no more than a couple of
instances where the ‘Jewish Question’ was discussed. Anti-Jewish
policy, as we have seen, had gathered pace since 1933 without
frequent or coherent central direction. It was no different in 1937.
Hitler’s views remained unchanged since his first statement on the
‘Jewish Question’ back in September 1919. He gave a clear
indication to a gathering of some 800 District Leaders of the party
in April 1937 of his tactical caution but ideological consistency in
the ‘Jewish Question’. Though he made plain to his enemies that he
wanted to destroy them, the struggle had to be conducted cleverly,
and over a period of time, he told his avid listeners. Skill would

help him manoeuvre them into a corner. Then would come the blow
to the heart.

But for the most part, he was content to remain for the time
inactive in the ‘Jewish Question’. His tacit approval was all that was
required. And no more was needed than his tirade against ‘Jewish
Bolshevism’ at the Party Rally in September to act as a green light
inviting the new antisemitic wave — even fiercer than that of 1935 -
that was to unfold throughout 1938.

After two relatively quiet years, discrimination against the Jews
again intensified. Increasingly radical steps were initiated to
eliminate them from the economy, and from more and more spheres
of social activity. The SD had in fact since the start of the year been
advocating renewed pressure on the Jews to force them out of the
economy and speed up their emigration from Germany. The
manufacture of a ‘popular mood hostile to Jews’ and the
deployment of illegal ‘excesses’ - mob violence, which was seen as
particularly effective - were recommended. By autumn, the climate
was becoming more hostile than ever for the Jewish population.
Schacht’s loss of influence, and finally his departure from the
Economics Ministry on 27 November, now removed an obstacle to
the ‘aryanization’ of the economy. Pressure to fulfil this aspect of
the Party’s Programme mounted. Goring, by this time in effect in
charge of the economy, was more than ready to push forward the
‘aryanization’. The upswing of the economy made big business,
losing the uncertainties of the first years of Nazi rule, willing
partners, eager to profit from the takeover of Jewish firms at
knock-down prices. By April 1938 more than 60 per cent of Jewish
firms had been liquidated or ‘aryanized’. From late 1937 onwards,
individual Jews also faced an expanding array of discriminatory
measures, initiated without central coordination by a variety of
ministries and offices — all in their way ‘working towards the
Fuhrer’ — which tightened immeasurably the screw of persecution.
Hitler’s own contribution, as usual, had largely consisted of setting
the tone and providing the sanction and legitimation for the actions
of others.

In world affairs, events beyond Hitler’s control were causing him
to speculate on the timing and circumstances in which the great
showdown would occur. By the end of 1937, the signs were that
radicalization was gathering pace not just in anti-Jewish policy
(and, largely instigated by the Gestapo, in the persecution and
repression of other ethnic and social minorities), but also in foreign
policy.

Hitler had begun the year by expressing his hope to those at his
lunch table that he still had six years to prepare for the coming
showdown. ‘But, if a very favourable chance comes along,’
commented Goebbels, ‘he also doesn’t want to miss it.’ Hitler
stressed Russian strength and warned against underestimating the
British because of their weak political leadership. He saw
opportunities of winning allies in eastern Europe (particularly
Poland) and the Balkans as a consequence of Russia’s drive for
world revolution. Hitler’s remarks followed a long briefing by
Blomberg earlier that morning in the War Ministry about the rapid
expansion of rearmament and the Wehrmacht’s preparations for
‘Case X’ — taken to be Germany, together with its fascist allies
against Russia, Czechoslovakia, and Lithuania. The question of
German occupation was evidently raised. Hitler, Goebbels, and
Blomberg discussed the installation of senior Gauleiter as Civilian
Commissars. Hitler was satisfied with what he had heard.

A foretaste of what might be expected from the German
leadership in war followed the dropping of two ‘red bombs’ on the
battleship Deutschland, stationed off Ibiza, by a Spanish Republican
plane on the evening of 29 May, killing twenty-three and injuring
over seventy sailors. Admiral Raeder, Commander-in-Chief of the
Navy, was dispatched by Blomberg to Munich to bear the brunt of
Hitler’s fury. Hitler’s immediate reaction, ‘fuming with rage’, as
Goebbels put it, was to bomb Valencia in reprisal. But after a hastily
arranged conference with Blomberg, Raeder, Goring, and von
Neurath, he ordered instead the cruiser Admiral Scheer to fire on the
southern Spanish harbour town of Almeria. Hitler, seething but
nervous at the outcome, paced up and down his room in the Reich

Chancellery until three o’clock in the morning. The shelling of
Almeria for an hour left twenty-one civilians dead, fifty-three
injured, and destroyed thirty-nine houses. Hitler was satisfied. He
had seen it as a prestige question. Prestige had now been restored.

He had by this time lost faith in Spain becoming a genuinely
fascist country. He saw Franco as a Spanish variant of General
Seeckt (the former ‘strong man’ in the German army in the 1920s) —-
a military man without any mass movement behind him. Despite his
wotries about Spain, however, he had no regrets about ordering
German intervention, and pointed to the many advantages which
Germany had drawn from its involvement. Goebbels’s diary notes
reflect Hitler’s wider perceptions of world affairs during the latter
half of 1937, and his watchful eye on opportunities for German
expansion. The radicalization in foreign policy which brought the
Anschluf$ with Austria and then the Sudeten crisis in Czechoslovakia
in 1938 were foreshadowed in Hitler’s musings on future
developments during these months.

The arch-enemy, the Soviet Union, was in Hitler’s eyes weakened
both by its internal turmoils and by Japanese triumphs in the war
against China. He was puzzled by the Stalinist purges. ‘Stalin is
probably sick in the brain,’ Goebbels reported him as saying. ‘His
bloody regime can otherwise not be explained. But Russia knows
nothing other than Bolshevism. That’s the danger we have to smash
down some day.’ A few months later, he was repeating the view
that Stalin and his followers were mad. ‘Must be exterminated’ was
his sinister conclusion. He was anticipating that the opportunity
might arise following a Japanese victory over China. Once China
was smashed, he guessed, Tokyo would turn its attention to
Moscow. ‘That is then our great hour,’ he predicted.

Hitler’s belief in an alliance with Britain had by now almost
evaporated. His attitude towards Britain had come to resemble that
of a lover spurned. Contemptuous of the British government, he
also saw Britain greatly weakened as a world power. Egged on by
Ribbentrop, by now aggressively anti-British, his hopes rested on his
new friend Mussolini.

Nothing was spared in the preparations for a huge extravaganza
with all conceivable pomp and circumstance to make the maximum
impact on the Duce during his state visit to Germany between 25
and 29 September. Mussolini took home with him an image of
German power and might — together with a growing sense that
Italy’s role in the Axis was destined to be that of junior partner.
Hitler was also overjoyed at the outcome. There had been
agreement on cooperation in Spain, and on attitudes towards the
war in the Far East. Hitler was certain that Italian friendship was
assured, since Italy had in any case little alternative. Only the
Austrian question, on which Mussolini would not be drawn,
remained open. ‘Well, wait and see,’ commented Goebbels.

From remarks recorded by Goebbels, it is clear that Hitler was
already by summer 1937 beginning to turn his eyes towards Austria
and Czechoslovakia, though as yet there was no indication of when
and how Germany might move against either state. Nor were
ideological or military-strategic motives, however important for
Hitler himself, the only ones influencing notions of expansion in
central Europe. Continuing economic difficulties, especially in
fulfilling the Wehrmacht’s demands for raw materials, had been the
main stimulus to increased German pressure on Austria since the
successful visit by Goring to Italy in January. Gold and foreign-
currency reserves, labour supplies, and important raw materials
were among the lure of a German takeover of the Alpine Republic.
Not surprisingly, therefore, the office of the Four-Year Plan was at
the forefront of demands for an Anschlufg as soon as possible. The
economic significance of the Austrian question was further
underlined by Hitler’s appointment in July 1937 of Wilhelm
Keppler, who had served before 1933 as an important link with
business leaders, to coordinate party affairs regarding Vienna.
Further concessions to follow on those of the 1936 agreement —
including the ending of censorship on Mein Kampf — were forced on
the Austrian government in July. ‘Perhaps we’re again coming a
step further,’ mused Goebbels. ‘In Austria, the Fuhrer will some
time make a tabula rasa,’ the Propaganda Minister noted, after a

conversation with Hitler at the beginning of August. ‘Let’s hope we
can all still experience it,’ he went on. ‘He’ll go for it then. This
state is not a state at all. Its people belong to us and will come to
us. The Ftihrer’s entry into Vienna will one day be his proudest
triumph.’ At the end of the Nuremberg Rally, a few weeks later,
Hitler told Goebbels that the issue of Austria would sometime be
resolved ‘with force’. Before the end of the year, Papen was
unfolding to Hitler plans to topple the Austrian Chancellor
Schuschnigg. Goring and Keppler were by then both convinced that
Hitler would tackle the question of Austria during the spring or
summer of 1938.

In the case of Czechoslovakia, too, Hitler’s intentions were
unmistakable to Goebbels. ‘Czechia is not a state, either,’ he noted
in his diary in August. ‘It will one day be overrun.’ The refusal by
Czech authorities to allow children from the Sudeten area to go for
holidays to Germany was used by Goebbels as the pretext to launch
the beginning of a vitriolic press campaign against the Czechs.
Goring had by this time been stressing to the British Ambassador,
Nevile Henderson, Germany’s rights to Austria and the Sudetenland
(in due course also to revision of the Polish border). To a long-
standing British acquaintance, the former air attaché in Berlin,
Group-Captain Christie, he went farther: Germany must have not
simply the Sudetenland, but the whole of Bohemia and Moravia,
Goring asserted. By mid-October, following the demands of Konrad
Henlein, the Sudeten German leader, for autonomy, Goebbels was
predicting that Czechoslovakia would in the future ‘have nothing to
laugh about’.

On 5 November 1937 the Propaganda Minister lunched, as usual,
with Hitler. The general situation was discussed. The Czech question
was to be toned down for the time being because Germany was still
not in a position to take any action. The issue of colonies was also
to be taken more slowly, so as not to awaken false expectations
among the population. In the run-up to Christmas, the heat had, too,
to be turned down on the ‘Church struggle’. The long-running saga
of Schacht was nearing its dénouement. Schacht had to go, it was

agreed. But the Fuhrer wanted to wait until after the party’s ritual
putsch commemoration on 9 November before taking any action. In
the afternoon, Goebbels went home to continue work. The Ftihrer,
he noted, had ‘General Staff talks’.

Vil

In the gloom of late afternoon, the chiefs of the army, Luftwaffe,
and navy, together with War Minister Blomberg, made their way to
the Reich Chancellery for a meeting, as they thought, to establish
the allocation of steel supplies to the armed forces. The reason for
the meeting dated back to late October, when Admiral Raeder,
increasingly concerned about Goring’s allocation of steel and the
preferential treatment of the Luftwaffe, had posed an ultimatum to
Blomberg indicating that no expansion of the navy was possible
without additional steel supplies. Raeder was unwilling to make
concessions. He thought an immediate decision by the Fuhrer was
necessary. With the dispute among the branches of the armed forces
simmering and the prospect of the arms drive stagnating, Blomberg
pressed Hitler for clarification. Eventually, Hitler agreed to the
meeting. Blomberg, not Hitler, sent out the invitations to discuss
‘the armaments situation and raw materials demands’ to the chiefs
of the three armed forces’ branches. The military leaders had a
surprise when they reached the Reich Chancellery at 4 p.m. to find
present, alongside Hitler and his military adjutant, Colonel
Hof&bach, also the Foreign Minister von Neurath. Another surprise
was waiting for them when, instead of dealing with the issue of raw
materials allocation (which was discussed relatively briefly only
towards the end of the lengthy meeting), Hitler, speaking from
prepared notes, launched into a monologue lasting over two hours
on Germany’s need to expand by use of force within the following
few years.

He began by emphasizing the importance of what he had to say.
He wanted, he said, to explain his thinking on foreign policy. In the
event of his death, what he had to say ought to be viewed as his

‘testamentary legacy’. No arrangements had been made for minutes
to be taken, but Hofsbach, sitting opposite Hitler at the table,
decided that what he was about to hear might be of some moment
and started to scribble notes in his diary. He was sure his mentor,
the increasingly critical General Beck, would be interested.

Hitler launched into a familiar theme: the need to expand German
‘living space’. Without this expansion, ‘sterility’, leading to social
disorder, would set in - an argument reflecting Hitler’s premiss that
permanent mobilization and ever new goals, foreign and domestic,
were necessary to ensure the popular support of the regime. In
characteristic vein, he raised alternatives to expansion of ‘living
space’, only to dismiss them. Only limited autarky could be
achieved. Food supplies could not be ensured by this route.
Dependence on the world economy could never bring economic
security, and would leave Germany weak and exposed. ‘Living
space’, he asserted, meant territory for agricultural production in
Europe, not acquisition of overseas colonies. Britain and France,
both implacably hostile, stood in Germany’s way. But Britain and its
Empire were weakened. And France faced internal difficulties. His
conclusion to the first part of his address was that Germany’s
problem could only be solved by the use of force, which was always
accompanied by risks. Only the questions ‘when?’ and ‘how?’
remained to be answered.

He went on to outline three scenarios. Typically, he first argued
that time was not on Germany’s side, that it would be imperative to
act by 1943-5 at the latest. The relative strength in armaments
would decrease. Other powers would be prepared for a German
offensive. Alluding to the problems of 1935-6, he raised the
prospect of economic difficulties producing a new food crisis
without the foreign exchange to master it — a potential ‘weakening-
point of the regime’. Declining birth-rates, falling living standards,
and the ageing of the Movement and its leaders were added points
to underline what he declared was his ‘unalterable determination to
solve the German problem of space by 1943-5 at the latest’.

In the other two scenarios, Hitler outlined circumstances in which
it would be necessary to strike before 1943-5: if France became so
enveloped by internal strife, or embroiled in war with another
power, that it was incapable of military action against Germany. In
either case the moment would have arrived to attack
Czechoslovakia. A war of France and Britain against Italy he saw as
a distinct possibility arising from the protracted conflict in Spain
(whose prolongation was in Germany’s interest). In such an
eventuality, Germany must be prepared to take advantage of the
circumstances to attack the Czechs and Austria without delay — even
as early as 1938. The first objective in any war involving Germany
would be to overthrow Czechoslovakia and Austria simultaneously
to protect the eastern flank for any possible military operation in
the west. Hitler conjectured that Britain, and probably France as
well, had already written off Czechoslovakia. Problems within the
Empire — Hitler had in mind here primarily the growing pressure for
independence in India — and reluctance to become embroiled in a
long European war would, he thought, prove decisive in deterring
Britain from involvement in a war against Germany. France was
unlikely to act without British support. Italy would not object to the
elimination of Czechoslovakia. Its attitude towards Austria could
not at the moment be determined. It would depend on whether
Mussolini were still alive — another implied argument for avoiding
delay. Poland would be too concerned about Russia to attack
Germany. Russia would be preoccupied with the threat from Japan.
The incorporation of Austria and Czechoslovakia would improve the
security of Germany’s borders, freeing up forces for other uses, and
would allow the creation of a further twelve divisions. Assuming
the expulsion of 3 million from the two countries, their annexation
would mean the acquisition of foodstuffs for 5 to 6 million people.
Hitler ended by stating that when the moment arrived the attack
upon the Czechs would have to be carried out ‘lightning fast’.

Hitler’s comments to his armed forces’ commanders were in line
with what he had been saying for weeks to Goebbels and other
party leaders. He wanted to use the occasion of the meeting about

raw materials allocation to impress similar arguments upon his
military leaders. The meeting on 5 November was the first time that
the Commanders-in-Chief of the Wehrmacht had been explicitly told
of Hitler’s thoughts on the likely timing and circumstances of
German expansion into Austria and Czechoslovakia.

Hitler was under no illusion at the negative response to his
comments. Blomberg, Fritsch, and Neurath in particular were
alarmed at what they heard. It was not the aim of expansion that
concerned them. There was no disagreement here with Hitler. His
familiar racial interpretation of Lebensraum had a different
emphasis, but accorded well enough with military-strategic interests
in German supremacy in central Europe, and with Goring’s aims of
economic dominance in south-eastern Europe. Nor did talk of the
annexation of Austria and destruction of Czechoslovakia worry
them. That both would happen at some point was by late 1937
largely taken for granted. Even General Beck’s sharp criticism of
Hitler’s statement, when he read an account some days later, did
not dispute ‘the expediency of clearing up the case of Czechia
(perhaps also Austria) if the opportunity presents itself ’.

What did shock them was the prospect of the early use of force,
and with that the grave danger that Germany would be plunged into
war with Britain and France. Hitler, they thought, was taking
foolhardy risks. They raised objections. Neurath saw an expansion
of the Mediterranean conflict, in the way Hitler had conceived it, as
highly unlikely. The generals pointed to deficiencies in Hitler’s
military analysis. On no account must Germany find itself at war
with Britain and France was the essence of their remarks. Even
Goring, though he kept quiet until the discussion moved on to
armaments matters, still favoured trying to reach agreement with
Britain. Only Raeder, who had wanted the meeting in the first
place, seemed unperturbed. If his later testimony is to be believed,
he did not take Hitler’s remarks seriously, other than as a vehicle to
spur on the army to speed up its armaments. Possible future conflict
with Britain was, for Raeder, an inevitable component of planning
for naval expansion. But an imminent conflict in the present state of

Germany’s armaments was, in his view, such ‘complete madness’
that it could not be envisaged as a serious proposition.

Others were less relaxed. Fritsch had to be reassured by Hitler at
the end of the meeting that there was no immediate danger of war,
and no need to cancel his planned leave. General Beck, shown a
copy of Hof&bach’s record of the meeting, found Hitler’s remarks
‘crushing’. What appalled him was the irresponsibility and
dilettantism with which Hitler was prepared to run the risk of
involving Germany in a catastrophic war with the western powers.
Neurath, who had arranged with Beck and Fritsch that he would
speak to Hitler, had the opportunity to do so in mid-January 1938.
Hitler’s policies, he warned, meant war. Many of his plans could be
attained by more peaceful methods, if somewhat more slowly.
Hitler replied that he had no more time.

Blomberg’s own doubts expressed at the November meeting
were, as usual, short-lived. The pliant War Minister was soon
conveying Hitler’s wishes to the upper echelons of the Wehrmacht.
Within weeks, without Hitler having to give any express order,
Chief of Defence Staff Colonel Alfred Jodl, recognizing what was
needed, had devised a significant alteration to the previous
mobilization plans against Czechoslovakia, aimed at preventing
Czech intervention in the event of a war against France. The new
directive included the sentence: ‘Once Germany has attained its full
war preparedness in all spheres, the military basis will have been
created to conduct an offensive war against Czechoslovakia and
thereby also to carry the German space problem to a triumphant
conclusion, even if one or other great power intervenes against us.’

Externally as well as internally, the Third Reich was entering a
new, more radical phase. The drift of Hitler’s thinking was plain
from the November meeting, and from his comments earlier in the
autumn. Nothing had been decided, no plans laid, no programme
established. It was still ‘wait and see’. But Hitler’s hand became
further strengthened at the end of January and beginning of
February 1938 by a chance set of events — a personal scandal
involving the War Minister Werner von Blomberg.

Blomberg was not popular in the top leadership of the army. He
was seen as too much Hitler’s man and too little the army’s. When
his personal life led to professional trouble in late January 1938, he
had no friends to count upon.

On a September morning in 1937, walking in the Tiergarten, the
Field-Marshal, widowed with five grown-up children, met the
woman who would change his life and, unwittingly, usher in the
biggest internal crisis in the Third Reich since the Rohm affair in the
summer of 1934. Blomberg, a lonely and empty individual, rapidly
became totally besotted with his new lady-friend, Fraulein
Margarethe Gruhn, thirty-five years younger than he was, and from
a crassly different social background. Within weeks he had asked
her to marry him. He needed the consent of Hitler, as supreme
commander of the Wehrmacht. He hinted that his fiancée was a
typist, a simple ‘girl from the people’, and that he was concerned
about the response of the officer class to his marriage to someone
below his status. Hitler immediately offered to be a witness to the
marriage to emphasize his rejection of such outmoded class
snobbery, and recommended Goring as the second witness. The
wedding was prepared in great secrecy. Even Blomberg’s adjutant
knew nothing of it until the previous afternoon. The ceremony,
attended only by Blomberg’s five children and the bride’s mother,
apart from the wedding couple and the witnesses, Hitler and
Goring, took place in the War Ministry on 12 January. There were
no celebrations. The simplest note of the wedding was published in
the newspapers.

Blomberg had good reason for wanting to keep his bride out of
the public eye. She had a past. Around Christmas 1931, then aged
eighteen, she had posed for a number of pornographic photos which
had come into the hands of the police. The following year the police
officially registered her as a prostitute. In 1934 she had again come
to the attention of the police, accused of stealing from a client.
Now, within days of the wedding, Berlin prostitutes started talking
about ‘one of them’ rising so far up the social ladder that she had

married the War Minister. An anonymous phone-call tipped off the
head of the army, Colonel-General Fritsch. The Gestapo had by this
time also picked up the rumours. The Berlin Police Chief, Wolf
Heinrich Graf von Helldorf, was put in the picture and, aware of the
political sensitivity of what he saw on the card registering Fraulein
Gruhn as a prostitute, immediately took the matter to Blomberg’s
closest colleague, Head of the Wehrmacht Office, General Wilhelm
Keitel, to ascertain that the woman with the police record was
indeed identical with the wife of the War Minister. Keitel, who had
seen Fraulein Gruhn on only one occasion, heavily veiled at the
funeral of Blomberg’s mother, could not help Helldorf, but referred
him to Goring, who had been a witness at the wedding. Goring
established the identity on 21 January. Three days later, Goring
stood nervously in the foyer of the Reich Chancellery, a brown file
in his hand, awaiting the return of Hitler from a stay in Bavaria.
Hitler was stunned at the news that awaited him. Prudery and
racial prejudice went hand in hand when he heard that the indecent
photos of Blomberg’s bride had been taken by a Jew of Czech
origin, with whom she was cohabiting at the time. Scurrilous
rumours had it that Hitler took a bath seven times the next day to
rid himself of the taint of having kissed the hand of Frau Blomberg.
What concerned him above all, however, was the blow to prestige
which would follow; that, as a witness at the wedding, he would
appear a laughing-stock in the eyes of the world. All night long, as
he later recounted, he lay awake, worrying how to avoid a loss of
face. The next day, as his adjutant Fritz Wiedemann recalled, he
paced up and down his room, his hands behind his back, shaking his
head and muttering, ‘ “If a German Field-Marshal marries a whore,
anything in the world is possible.” ’ Goebbels and Goring tried to
cheer him up over lunch. That morning, Hitler had spoken for the
first time to his military adjutant Colonel Ho&bach about the
matter. He praised Blomberg’s achievements. But the Field-Marshal
had caused him great embarrassment through not telling him the
truth about his bride and involving him as a witness at the wedding.
He expressed his sadness at having to lose such a loyal colleague.

But because of his wife’s past, Blomberg had to go as War Minister.
‘Blomberg can’t be saved,’ noted Goebbels. ‘Only the pistol remains
for a man of honour ... The Fithrer as marriage witness. It’s
unthinkable. The worst crisis of the regime since the Rohm affair ...
The Ftihrer looks like a corpse.’

Presuming that Blomberg was ignorant of his wife’s shady past,
and hoping to hush the matter up and prevent a public scandal,
Goring hurried to persuade the Field-Marshal to have his marriage
immediately annulled. To the astonishment and disgust of Goring
and of Hitler, Blomberg refused. On the morning of 27 January,
Hitler had his last audience with Blomberg. It began in heated
fashion, but became calmer, and ended with Hitler offering
Blomberg the prospect of rejoining him, all forgotten, if Germany
should be involved in war. A day later, Blomberg was gone — over
the border to Italy to begin a year’s exile, sweetened by a 50,000
Mark ‘golden handshake’ and his full pension as a Field-Marshal.

The crisis for Hitler had meanwhile deepened. On the very
evening, 24 January, that he was recoiling from the shock of the
news about his War Minister, and in a bleak mood, he remembered
the whiff of a potential scandal two years earlier concerning the
head of the army, Colonel-General von Fritsch. Himmler had
presented him at the time, in the summer of 1936, with a file
raising suspicions that Fritsch had been blackmailed by a Berlin
rent-boy by the name of Otto Schmidt on account of alleged
homosexual practices in late 1933. Hitler had refused to believe the
allegations, had rejected out of hand any investigation, said he
never wanted to hear any more of the matter, and ordered the file
destroyed. Now, he told Himmler that he wanted the file
reconstructed as a matter of urgency. The reconstruction posed no
difficulties since, counter to Hitler’s express orders to destroy it,
Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Security Police, had had the file put
in a safe. Within hours, by 2.15 a.m. in the early morning of 25
January, the file was on Hitler’s desk.

Hitler had not summoned the file as part of a well-thought-out
strategy to be rid of Fritsch as well as Blomberg. In fact, he was

apparently still thinking of Fritsch on the morning of 26 January, a
day after he had seen the ‘reconstructed’ file, as Blomberg’s possible
successor as War Minister. In the light of the shock he had just
received, and his immediate loss of confidence in his leading
officers, Hitler now wanted assurance that no further scandals were
likely to be forthcoming. But just as the Blomberg case was
unexpected, so were developments in the Fritsch case to unfold in
an unpredictable fashion. Without the Blomberg affair, Hitler is said
subsequently to have told his army adjutant Major Gerhard Engel,
the Fritsch case would never have come up again. The second crisis
arose from the first.

On the morning of 25 January, in his state of depression over
Blomberg, Hitler gave the thin file on Fritsch to Hof$bach with
instructions for absolute secrecy. HofSbach was horrified at the
implications for the Wehrmacht of a second scandal. He thought
Fritsch, whom he greatly admired, would easily clear up the matter
— or would know what to do. Either way, the honour of the army
would be preserved. In this frame of mind, he disobeyed Hitler’s
express order and informed Fritsch about the file. It was a fateful
step.

Fritsch, when Hofsbach broke the news of the file on the evening
of 25 January, reacted with anger and disgust at the allegations,
declaring them a pack of lies. Hof&bach reported back to Hitler. The
Dictator showed no sign of anger at the act of disobedience. In fact,
he seemed relieved, commenting that since everything was in order,
Fritsch could become War Minister. However, Hitler added that
Hofsbach had done him a great disservice in destroying the element
of secrecy. In fact, Hof$bach had unwittingly done Fritsch an even
greater disservice.

When he heard from Hofgbach what was afoot, Fritsch not
unnaturally brooded for hours about the allegations. They must
have something to do, he thought, with the member of the Hitler
Youth with whom he had lunched, usually alone, in 1933-4, ina
willingness to comply with the request of the Winter Aid Campaign
to provide free meals for the needy. He presumed that malicious

tongues had manufactured an illicit relationship out of harmless acts
of charity. Thinking he could clear up a misunderstanding, he
sought out Hofgbach the following day, 26 January. All he did,
however, was raise the private doubts of Hitler’s military adjutant.
Hof&bach did not think to indicate to Fritsch that to mention the
Hitler Youth story might not be tactically the best way to convince
Hitler of his innocence.

During the afternoon, Hitler conferred with Himmler, Reich
Justice Minister Gtirtner, and Goring (who saw Fritsch as his rival
for Blomberg’s post as War Minister). There was a general air of
mistrust. By early evening, Hitler was still wavering. Goring
pressed him to come to a decision. Hofbach chose the moment to
suggest that Hitler speak directly about the matter to Fritsch. After
some hesitation, Hitler agreed. In the meantime, four Gestapo
officers had been sent to the Borgermoor internment camp in the
Emsland to fetch Otto Schmidt to Berlin. In Hitler’s private library
in the Reich Chancellery that evening a remarkable scene ensued:
the head of the army, in civilian clothing, was confronted by his
accuser, an internee of proven ill-repute, in the presence of his
supreme commander and head of state, and the Prussian Minister
President Goring.

Hitler looked despondent to Fritsch. But he came straight to the
point. He wanted, he said, simply the truth. If Fritsch acknowledged
his guilt, he was prepared to have the matter hushed up and send
him well away from Germany. He had contemplated the possibility
of Fritsch perhaps serving as military adviser to Chiang Kai-shek.
Fritsch vehemently professed his innocence. He then made the
mistake of telling Hitler about the harmless episode of the Hitler
Youth boy. It had precisely the opposite effect to that hoped for by
Fritsch. Hitler’s suspicions rose immediately. He now gave Fritsch
the file. While he was reading it, Fritsch’s alleged blackmailer was
brought in. Otto Schmidt, who had proved a reliable witness in a
number of other cases where he had blackmailed individuals,
insisted that he recognized Fritsch as the man in question. Fritsch
repeated several times, in a cool and collected manner, that he had

never seen the man in his life before and gave Hitler his word of
honour that he had nothing to do with the entire affair. Hitler had
expected, so he told his generals a few days later, that Fritsch would
have thrown the file at his feet. His subdued behaviour did not
impress Hitler as an impassioned display of injured innocence.
Fritsch for his part found it difficult to believe that Hitler and
Goring retained their suspicions and simply ignored the word of
honour of a high-ranking German officer. The reality, as Goebbels,
recognized, was that Hitler had by now lost faith in Fritsch.

The Gestapo’s interrogation of Fritsch on the morning of 27
January, when he again faced his tormentor Schmidt, was
inconclusive. Schmidt remained adamant in his accusations, Fritsch
indignantly vehement in his denial of any involvement. The level of
detail in the accuser’s story seemed telling. But as Fritsch pointed
out, though to no avail, the detail was erroneous. The alleged
meeting with Fritsch was said to have taken place in November
1933. Schmidt claimed to have remembered it as if it had been the
previous day. Yet he had Fritsch smoking (which he had not done
since 1925), wearing a fur coat (such as he had never possessed),
and — Schmidt was repeatedly pressed on this point — announcing
himself as ‘General of the Artillery von Fritsch’, a rank he had
attained only on 1 February 1934. The inconsistency in evidence
was not picked up or acted upon. It remained a matter of word
against word.

Meanwhile, Hitler had given the Fritsch file to Justice Minister
Franz Gurtner, and asked for his views. Goebbels had little
confidence in the outcome. ‘Gtirtner has now still to write a legal
report,’ he wrote. ‘But what use is all that. The porcelain is
smashed.’ Girtner’s report, delivered before the end of the month,
was damning. Upturning conventional legal notions, Gurtner stated
that Fritsch had not proved his innocence and regarded the issue of
the Hitler Youth boy as damaging to his case. But Gtirtner insisted
upon a legal trial for Fritsch in front of a military court. The
military leadership backed the demand. Even if reluctantly, in the

case of so prominent a person as the head of the army Hitler had
little choice but to concede.

The double scandal of Blomberg and Fritsch had left the Nazi
leadership with a major public-relations problem. How was it all to
be explained to the people? How was a serious blow to prestige and
standing to be avoided? On Thursday 27 January, Hitler, looking
pale and grey, decided to cancel his big speech to the Reichstag on
the anniversary of the ‘seizure of power’. The meeting of the Reich
cabinet was also cancelled. Goebbels suggested that a way out of
the political crisis would be for Hitler himself to take over the
whole of the Wehrmacht, with the different sections of the armed
forces turned into separate ministries. ‘And then comes the most
difficult question,’ he added: ‘how to put it to the people. The
wildest rumours are circulating. The Fuhrer is at the end of his
tether. None of us has slept since Monday.’

Goebbels’s suggestion — if indeed it originally came from him —
for restructuring the Wehrmacht leadership entirely was at least in
part taken up. It offered a neat way out of a choice of successor for
Blomberg. Goring’s self-evident ambitions for this post were never
seriously entertained by Hitler. Blomberg, Keitel, and Wiedemann
all spoke out in Goring’s favour. Goring himself would have been
prepared to give up his control of the Four-Year Plan in return for
the War Ministry. Hitler was, however, dismissive of his military
abilities. He was not even competent, Hitler scoffed, in running the
Luftwaffe, let alone the whole of the armed forces. For the army
and the navy, the appointment of Goring (who had in his regular
military career never had a rank higher than that of captain) would
have been insulting. More than that, it would have amounted for
Hitler to a heavy concentration of military command in the hands of
one man. Heinrich Himmler also cherished ambitions — though
always wholly unrealistic ones for a police chief who headed a small
rival military force to that of the army in what would develop into
the Waffen-SS, who had not served in the First World War, and
who, in the later disparaging comment of one general, scarcely
knew how to drive a fire-engine. Hitler told his generals on 5

February that rumours of Himmler taking over had been ‘insane
twaddle’. A third ambitious hopeful, General Walter von Reichenau,
was seen as far too close to the party and too untraditionalist to be
acceptable to the army.

In fact, already on 27 January, picking up a suggestion made by
Blomberg at his farewell audience, Hitler had decided to take over
the Wehrmacht leadership himself, appointing no successor to the
War Ministry. Within hours, he was initiating General Keitel
(scarcely known to him to this point, but recommended by
Blomberg) in his — that is to say, initially Blomberg’s — ideas for a
new organizational structure for the Wehrmacht. Keitel, he said,
would be his sole adviser in questions relating to the Wehrmacht.
With one move, this shifted the internal balance of power within
the armed forces from the traditionalist leadership and general staff
of the army (as the largest sector) to the office of the Wehrmacht,
representing the combined forces, and directly dependent upon and
pliant towards Hitler. In a statement for army leaders on 7
February, explaining the changes that had taken place, it was
claimed that Hitler’s takeover of the Wehrmacht command ‘was
already intended in his programme, but for a later date’. In reality,
it was a rapidly taken decision providing a way out of an
embarrassing crisis.

His removal for days a matter of little more than timing, Fritsch
was asked by Hitler on 3 February for his resignation. By then, an
increasingly urgent answer — given the rumours now circulating — to
the presentational problem of how to explain the departure of the
two most senior military leaders had been found: ‘In order to put a
smoke-screen round the whole business, a big reshuffle will take
place,’ noted Goebbels. In a two-hour discussion, alone with
Goebbels in his private rooms, Hitler went over the whole affair —
how disillusioned he had been by Blomberg, whom he had trusted
blindly; how he disbelieved Fritsch despite his denials — ‘these sort
of people always do that’; how he would take over the Wehrmacht
himself with the branches of the armed forces as ministries; and the
personnel changes he intended to make, particularly the

replacement of Neurath by Ribbentrop at the Foreign Office. ‘Fuhrer
wants to deflect the spotlight from the Wehrmacht, make Europe
hold its breath,’ recorded Colonel Jodl in his diary. The Austrian
Chancellor Schuschnigg, he added ominously, should be ‘trembling’.

Within four days the reshuffle was in place. Twelve generals
(apart from Blomberg and Fritsch) were removed, six from the
Luftwaffe; fifty-one other posts (a third in the Luftwaffe) were also
refilled. Fritsch’s post was given to Walther von Brauchitsch — a
compromise candidate suggested by Blomberg and Keitel to keep
out Reichenau. The navy was left alone. Raeder had, according to
Goebbels’s report of Hitler’s views, ‘behaved splendidly during the
entire crisis and everything is in order in the navy’. Goring was
given a Field-Marshal’s baton as consolation prize for missing the
War Ministry. Major changes were also undertaken in the
diplomatic service. Neurath, having to make way for his arch-rival
Ribbentrop, was ‘elevated’ to a pseudo-position as head of a ‘privy
council’ of ministers which was never to meet. The key
ambassadorial posts in Rome, Tokyo, London, and Vienna were
given new occupants. Schacht’s replacement by Funk at the Ministry
of Economics was also announced as part of the general reshuffle.

Blomberg and Fritsch were said to have retired ‘on health
grounds’. Blomberg would survive the war, still praising the ‘genius
of the Fuhrer but dismayed that Hitler had not called upon his
services once more, and would die, shunned to the last by his
former army comrades, in prison in Nuremberg in March 1946.
Fritsch’s innocence — the victim of mistaken identity — would be
established by a military court in Berlin on 18 March 1938. Though
his name had been cleared, he did not gain the rehabilitation he
hoped for. Deeply depressed and embittered, but still claiming to be
‘a good National Socialist’, he volunteered for his old artillery
regiment in the Polish campaign and would fall fatally wounded on
the outskirts of Warsaw on 22 September 1939.

A communiqué on the sweeping changes -— said to be in the
interest of the ‘strongest concentration of all political, military, and
economic forces in the hand of the supreme leader’ — was broadcast

on the evening of 4 February. The sensational news covered page
after page of the following day’s newspapers. Great surprise,
worries about the likelihood of war, and a flurry of the wildest
rumours — including an attack on Hitler’s life, mass shootings and
arrests, attempts to depose Hitler and Goring and proclaim a
military dictatorship, war-plans opposed by the dismissed generals —
were common reactions over the next days. The real reasons were
kept dark. ‘Praise God the people know nothing of it all and would
not believe it,’ Goebbels reported Hitler as saying. ‘Therefore
greatest discretion.’ Hitler’s way to handle it was to emphasize the
concentration of forces under his leadership and ‘let nothing be
noticed’.

The following afternoon, 5 February, a pallid and drawn-looking
Hitler addressed his generals. He described what had happened,
cited from the police reports, and read out sections of Giirtner’s
damning assessment on Fritsch. The assembled officers were
benumbed. No objections were raised. Hitler’s explanations
appeared convincing. No one doubted that he could have acted
differently. At a crucial moment, the undermining of the moral
codex of the officer corps by its leading representatives had
weakened the authority of the military leadership and in so doing
had considerably strengthened Hitler’s position.

Though the crisis was unforeseen, not manufactured, the
Blomberg-Fritsch affair engendered a key shift in the relations
between Hitler and the most powerful non-Nazi élite, the army. At
precisely the moment when Hitler’s adventurism was starting to
cause shivers of alarm, the army had demonstrated its weakness and
without a murmur of protest swallowed his outright dominance
even in the immediate domain of the Wehrmacht. Hitler recognized
the weakness, was increasingly contemptuous of the officer corps,
and saw himself more and more in the role not only of head of
state, but of great military leader.

The outcome of the Blomberg—Fritsch affair amounted to the
third stepping-stone — after the Reichstag fire and the ‘Rohm-Putsch’
— cementing Hitler’s absolute power and, quite especially, his

dominance over the army. With the military emasculated and the
hawkish Ribbentrop at the Foreign Office, Hitler’s personal drive for
the most rapid expansion possible — blending with the expansionist
dynamic coming from the economy and the arms race — was
unshackled from the forces which could have counselled caution. In
the months that followed, the radical dynamic that had been
building up through 1937 would take foreign and domestic
developments into new terrain. The threat of war would loom ever
closer. Racial persecution would again intensify. Hitler’s ideological
‘vision’ was starting to become reality. The momentum which Hitler
had done so much to force along, but which was driven too by
forces beyond his personality, was carrying him along with it.
‘Vision’ was beginning to overcome cold, political calculation. The
danger-zone was being entered.

14
The Drive for Expansion

Since his boyhood days in Linz, Hitler had seen the future of
Austria’s German-speaking population lying in its incorporation in
the German Reich. Like many in his part of Austria, he had favoured
the ideas of Georg Schonerer, the Pan-Germanist leader, rejecting
the Habsburg monarchy and looking to union with the Wilhelmine
Reich in Germany. Defeat in the First World War had then brought
the dismembering of the sprawling, multi-ethnic empire of the
Habsburgs. The new Austria, the creation of the victorious powers
at the Treaty of St Germain in September 1919, was no more than a
mere remnant of the former empire. The small alpine republic now
had only 7 million citizens (compared with 54 million in the
empire), 2 million of them in Vienna itself. It was wracked by
daunting social and economic problems, and deep political fissures,
accompanied by smouldering resentment about its loss of territory
and revised borders. The new Austria was, however, almost entirely
German-speaking. The idea of union (or Anschluf&) with Germany
now became far more appealing and was overwhelmingly supported
in plebiscites in the early 1920s. Hitler’s rise to power in Germany
changed this. It accentuated the already acute divisions between
socialists, pan-Germans, and Catholic-conservatives (with their own
Austrian-nationalist brand of fascism). Only for the pan-Germans, by
now entirely sucked into the Austrian Nazi Movement, was an
Anschlufg with Hitler’s Germany an attractive proposition. But,
despite the ban on the Nazi Party in Austria following the German-
inspired assassination of the Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfufs
in July 1934, the increasing might of the Third Reich and the

growing exposure of Austria to German dominance as Italy’s
protection waned in the wake of the Abyssinian conflict kept the
Anschlufg hopes alive among one sizeable part of the Austrian
population.

For Hitler’s regime in Germany, meanwhile, the prospects of
attaining the union with Austria implicit in the first point of the
Nazi Party Programme of 1920, demanding ‘the merger of all
Germans ... in a Greater Germany’, had become much rosier in the
changed diplomatic circumstances following Italy’s embroilment in
Abyssinia and the triumphant remilitarization of the Rhineland.
Hitler had written on the very first page of Mein Kampf: ‘German-
Austria must return to the great German mother-country, and not
because of any economic considerations. No, and again no: even if
such a union were unimportant from an economic point of view;
yes, even if it were harmful, it must nevertheless take place. One
blood demands one Reich.’ Ideological impulses were, however, far
from alone in driving on the quest to bring Austria under German
sway. Whatever his emphasis in Mein Kampf, by the late 1930s
Austria’s geographical position, straddling strategically vital
stretches of central Europe, and the significant material resources
that would accrue to Germany’s economy, hard-pressed in the push
to rearm as swiftly as possible under the Four-Year Plan, were the
key determinants in forcing the pace of policy towards the Reich’s
eastern neighbour.

On a number of occasions during the second half of 1937, Hitler
had spoken in imprecise but menacing terms about moving against
Austria. In September he had sounded out Mussolini about a likely
Italian reaction, but received inconsequential, if not discouraging,
replies. Then the visit to Germany in mid-November by Lord
Halifax, Lord Privy Seal and President of the Council in the British
Government, close to the recently appointed British Prime Minister
Neville Chamberlain and soon to become his Foreign Secretary, had
confirmed in Hitler’s mind that Britain would do nothing in the
event of German action against Austria.

Hitler was by this time ready to end Austria’s independence
within the foreseeable future. The Austro-German treaty of 11 July
1936 together with improved relations with Italy had inevitably
brought greater German pressure on Austria. Only increasingly
fragile reliance on Italy and recognizably unrealistic hopes placed in
the western powers could hinder the relentless squeeze on Austria’s
exposed position in central Europe. Papen, now ambassador in
Vienna, and Foreign Minister Neurath exerted their own influence
where possible, the former largely through direct links with Hitler,
the latter through official Foreign Office channels; the growing
numbers of Austrian Nazis unfolded a ceaseless clamour of
agitation; the bosses of the Four-Year Plan and leaders of the
ferrous industries cast envious eyes on Austria’s iron-ore deposits
and other sources of scarce raw materials; above all, it was
Hermann Goring, at this time close to the pinnacle of his power,
who, far more than Hitler, throughout 1937 made the running and
pushed hardest for an early and radical solution to ‘the Austrian
question’.

Goring was not simply operating as Hitler’s agent in matters
relating to ‘the Austrian question’. His approach differed in
emphasis in significant respects. As with Hitler, anti-Bolshevism was
central to his thinking. But Goring’s broad notions of foreign policy,
which he pushed to a great extent on his own initiative in the mid-
1930s, drew more on traditional pan-German concepts of nationalist
power-politics to attain hegemony in Europe than on the racial
dogmatism central to Hitler’s ideology. Return of colonies (never a
crucial issue for Hitler), the alliance with Britain (which he
continued to strive for long after Hitler’s ardour had cooled), and an
emphasis on domination in south-eastern Europe to ensure German
raw-material supplies from a huge economic sphere of exploitation
(Grofsraumwirtschaft, a notion that differed from Hitler’s racially
determined emphasis on Lebensraum), were the basic props of his
programme to ensure Germany’s hegemony. Within this framework,
Austria’s geography and raw materials gave it both strategically and
economically a pivotal position.

Goring was increasingly determined, now as supremo of the Four-
Year Plan, in the face of Germany’s mounting problems of securing
raw-material supplies, to press for what he called the ‘union’ or
‘merger’ of Austria and Germany — even, if necessary, at the
expense of the alliance with Italy on which Hitler placed such store.
By the beginning of 1938, the noose had tightened around Austria’s
neck. Goring was pushing hard for currency union. But with Austria
stalling for time, and Italy’s reactions uncertain, immediate results
through diplomatic channels seemed unlikely. An Anschluf resulting
from German intervention through force in the imminent future
appeared improbable.

At this unpromising juncture, the idea emerged of a meeting
between Hitler and the Austrian Chancellor Schuschnigg. According
to Papen’s later account, he had suggested such a meeting to the
Austrian Chancellor in December. He had then put the same
suggestion to Neurath and Hitler. He repeated the suggestion to
Guido Schmidt, state secretary in the Austrian Foreign Ministry, on
7 January, indicating Hitler’s readiness to have a meeting towards
the end of the month. Schuschnigg agreed the date. Hitler had then
had the meeting postponed because of the Blomberg-—Fritsch crisis.
It was eventually rearranged for 12 February.

The Austrians had meanwhile uncovered documents embarrassing
to the German government, revealing the plans of the Austrian
NSDAP for serious disturbances (including, as a provocation, the
murder of Papen by Austrian Nazis disguised as members of the
Fatherland Front) aimed at bringing down Schuschnigg. At the same
time, Schuschnigg was trying to win over Arthur Sey{$-Inquart — an
Austrian lawyer and Nazi sympathizer who had kept his distance
from the rowdier elements within the NSDAP - to incorporate the
Nazis in a united patriotic Right in Austria which would appease
Berlin but preserve Austrian independence. Sey{$ was, however, in
Hitler’s pocket, betraying to Berlin exactly what Schuschnigg was
prepared to concede. The terms forced upon Schuschnigg by Hitler
at the meeting on 12 February were in essence an expanded version
of those which the Austrian Chancellor himself had put to Sey and

were already fully known in Berlin prior to the meeting. The main
difference was nevertheless a significant one: that Sey{$ be made
Minister of the Interior, and that his powers should be extended to
include control of the police.

At 11 a.m. on 12 February, Papen met the Austrian Chancellor, in
the company of Guido Schmidt and an adjutant, on the German-
Austrian border at Salzburg, where they had spent the night. The
Austrian visitors were not enamoured at hearing that three German
generals would be among the party awaiting them at the Berghof.
Nicolaus von Below, Hitler’s Luftwaffe adjutant, had been told to
make sure Keitel was present, and in addition one or two generals
of particularly ‘martial’ demeanour. Below’s recommendation of the
commanding generals of army and Luftwaffe in Munich, Walter von
Reichenau (one of the most thoroughly nazified generals) and Hugo
Sperrle (who the previous year had commanded the Legion Condor,
the squadrons sent to aid the nationalists in Spain), had met with
Hitler’s enthusiastic approval. Keitel had arrived that morning from
Berlin, along with Ribbentrop. The two generals had travelled from
Munich. They were told by Hitler that their presence was purely
intended to intimidate Schuschnigg by the implied threat of military
force.

Hitler, tense and keyed up, received Schuschnigg on the steps of
his alpine retreat with due politeness. However, as soon as they
entered the great hall, with its breathtaking view over the
mountains, his mood abruptly changed. When Schuschnigg
remarked on the beauty of the panorama, Hitler snapped: ‘Yes, here
my ideas mature. But we haven’t come together to talk about the
beautiful view and the weather.’

Hitler took Schuschnigg into his study while Papen, Schmidt,
Ribbentrop, and the others remained outside. Once inside he
launched into a ferocious attack, lasting till lunchtime, on Austria’s
long history of ‘treason’ against the German people. ‘And this I tell
you, Herr Schuschnigg,’ he reportedly threatened. ‘I am firmly
determined to make an end of all this ... I have a historic mission,
and this I will fulfil because Providence has destined me to do so ...

You don’t believe you can hold me up for half an hour, do you?
Who knows? Perhaps I’ll appear sometime overnight in Vienna; like
a spring storm. Then you'll see something.’

Meanwhile, Ribbentrop had presented Guido Schmidt with
Hitler’s ultimatum: an end to all restrictions on National Socialist
activity in Austria, an amnesty for those Nazis arrested, the
appointment of Sey{s Inquart to the Ministry of the Interior with
control over the security forces, another Nazi sympathizer, Edmund
Glaise-Horstenau (a former military archivist and historian), to be
made War Minister, and steps to begin the integration of the
Austrian economic system with that of Germany. The demands were
to be implemented by 15 February — timing determined by Hitler’s
major speech on foreign policy, set for 20 February.

Hitler threatened to march into Austria if his demands were not
met in full. Schuschnigg refused to buckle to the threats. Only the
Austrian President, he declared, could make cabinet appointments
and grant an amnesty. He could not guarantee that such action
would be taken. As Schuschnigg was retreating for further
discussions with Schmidt, Hitler’s bellow for Keitel to come
immediately could be heard throughout the house. When the
general, arriving at the double in Hitler’s study, asked what was
required of him, he was told: ‘Nothing. Sit down.’ After ten minutes
of inconsequential chat, he was told to go.

But the impact of the charade was not lost on Schuschnigg. The
threat of military invasion seemed very real. Eventually, Papen
brokered a number of alterations in the German demands and,
under pressure, the Austrians finally accepted the chief difficulty,
the appointment of Sey-Inquart. Hitler told Schuschnigg: ‘For the
first time in my life I have made up my mind to reconsider a final
decision.’ With a heavy heart, Schuschnigg signed.

Two weeks later, when laying down directives for the restless
Austrian NSDAP, which had threatened to upset developments
through its own wild schemes for disturbances, Hitler emphasized
that he wanted to proceed along ‘the evolutionary way whether or
not the possibility of success could be envisaged at present. The

protocol signed by Schuschnigg,’ he went on, ‘was so far-reaching
that if implemented in full the Austrian Question would
automatically be solved. A solution through force was something he
did not now want if it could in any way be avoided, since for us the
foreign-policy danger is diminishing from year to year and the
military strength becoming year by year greater.’ Hitler’s approach
was at this time still in line with Goring’s evolutionary policy. He
plainly reckoned that the tightening of the thumb-screws on
Schuschnigg at the February meeting had done the trick. Austria
was no more than a German satellite. Extinction of the last
remnants of independence would follow as a matter of course. Force
was not necessary.

In line with the ‘Trojan horse’ policy of eroding Austrian
independence from the inside, following the Berchtesgaden meeting
Hitler had complied with demands from Sey({$-Inquart — matching
earlier representations by Schuschnigg himself — to depose Captain
Josef Leopold, the leader of the unruly Austrian National Socialists,
and his associates. Even so, the meeting at the Berghof and Hitler’s
speech on 20 February, his first broadcast in full on Austrian radio —
stating that ‘in the long run’ it was ‘unbearable’ for Germans to look
on the separation of 10 million fellow Germans by borders imposed
through peace treaties — had given the Austrian Nazis a new wind.
Disturbances mounted, especially in the province of Styria, in the
south-east of the country, where resentment at the loss of territory
to the new state of Yugoslavia after the First World War had helped
fuel the radicalism that had turned the region into a hotbed of
Austrian Nazism. The situation was by now highly volatile, the
Nazis barely controllable by Austrian state forces. Schuschnigg’s
own emotional appeals to Austrian patriotism and independence had
merely exacerbated the tension within the country and further
irritated Hitler. At the same time, Schuschnigg, evidently impressed
by Hitler’s threats to use force and anxious to avoid anything that
might occasion this, was reassuring Britain, France, and Italy that he
had the situation in hand rather than rousing foreign sympathy at
German strong-arm tactics. The resignation as Foreign Secretary on

21 February of Anthony Eden, despised by the German leadership,
and his replacement by Lord Halifax was meanwhile seen in Berlin
as a further indication of British appeasement.

The same tone came across in comments of Sir Nevile Henderson,
the British Ambassador in Berlin, when he met Hitler on 3 March.
Hitler, in a vile mood, was unyielding. If Britain opposed a just
settlement in Austria, where Schuschnigg had the support of only 15
per cent of the population, Germany would have to fight, he
declared. And if he intervened, he would do so like lightning. His
aim was nevertheless ‘that the just interests of the German Austrians
should be secured and an end made to oppression by a process of
peaceful evolution’. However inadequately the undermining of the
Austrian state from within through a combination of infiltration and
agitation, backed by German bullying, could be described as
‘peaceful evolution’, pressure-tactics, not armed takeover, still
formed the preferred solution to the Austrian Question.

Such notions were thrown overboard by Schuschnigg’s wholly
unexpected decision, announced on the morning of 9 March, to hold
a referendum on Austrian autonomy four days later. The Nazis
themselves had been pressing for years for a plebiscite on Anschlufs,
confident that they would gain massive support for an issue backed
by large numbers of Austrians since 1919. But Schuschnigg’s
referendum, asking voters to back ‘a free and German, independent
and social, Christian and united Austria; for freedom and work, and
for the equality of all who declare for race and fatherland’, was
couched in a way that could scarcely fail to bring the desired result.
It would be a direct rebuff to union with Germany. German plans
were immediately thrown into disarray. Hitler’s own prestige was
at stake. The moves that followed, culminating in the German
march into Austria and the Anschlufg, were all now improvised at
breakneck speed.

The German government was completely taken aback by
Schuschnigg’s gamble. Hitler was at first incredulous. But his
astonishment rapidly gave way to mounting fury at what he saw as
a betrayal of the Berchtesgaden agreement. When Goebbels was

suddenly summoned to Hitler’s presence, Goring was already there.
He was told of Schuschnigg’s move — ‘an extremely dirty trick’ to
‘dupe’ the Reich through ‘a stupid and idiotic plebiscite’. The trio
were still unsure how to act. They considered replying either by
Nazi abstention from the plebiscite (which would have undermined
its legitimacy), or by sending 1,000 aeroplanes to drop leaflets over
Austria ‘and then actively intervening’. For the time being, the
German press was instructed to publish nothing at all about Austria.

By late at night, perhaps egged on by Goring, Hitler was
warming up. Goebbels was again called in. Glaise-Horstenau, on a
visit in southern Germany when suddenly summoned to Berlin by
Goring, was also present. “The Fuhrer drastically outlines for him
his plans,’ Goebbels recorded. ‘Glaise recoils from the
consequences.’ But Hitler, who went on to discuss the situation
alone with Goebbels until 5 a.m., was now ‘in full swing’ and
showing ‘a wonderful fighting mood’. ‘He believes the hour has
arrived,’ noted Goebbels. He wanted to sleep on it. But he was sure
that Italy and England would do nothing. Action from France was
possible, but not likely. ‘Risk not so great as at the time of the
occupation of the Rhineland’ was the conclusion.

Just how unprepared the German leadership had been was shown
by the fact that the Foreign Minister, Ribbentrop, was in London,
Reichenau had to be recalled from Cairo, and General Erhard Milch
(Goring’s right-hand man in the Luftwaffe) was summoned from
holiday in Switzerland. Goring himself was scheduled to preside
over the military court to hear the Fritsch case, meeting for the first
time on 10 March. The hearing was abruptly adjourned when a
courier brought a message demanding Goring’s presence in the
Reich Chancellery. Goebbels had also been called there, arriving to
find Hitler deep in thought, bent over maps. Plans were discussed
for transporting 4,000 Austrian Nazis who had been exiled to
Bavaria, together with a further 7,000 paramilitary reservists.

The Wehrmacht leadership was taken completely by surprise
through Hitler’s demand for plans for military intervention. Keitel,
abruptly ordered to the Reich Chancellery on the morning of 10

March, spinelessly suggested calling in Brauchitsch and Beck,
knowing full well that no plans existed, but wishing to avoid having
to tell this to Hitler. Brauchitsch was not in Berlin. Beck
despairingly told Keitel: ‘We have prepared nothing, nothing has
happened, nothing.’ But his objections were dismissed out of hand
by Hitler. He was sent away to report within hours on which army
units would be ready to march on the morning of the 12th.

Around midnight Goebbels was once more called to see Hitler.
‘The die is cast,’ he noted. ‘On Saturday march in. Push straight to
Vienna. Big aeroplane action. The Fuhrer is going himself to
Austria. Goring and IJ are to stay in Berlin. In a week Austria will be
ours.’ He discussed the propaganda arrangements with Hitler, then
returned to his Ministry to work on them until 4 a.m. No one was
now allowed to leave the Ministry till the ‘action’ began. The
activity was feverish. ‘Again a great time. With a great historical
task ... It’s wonderful,’ he wrote.

Prominent in Hitler’s mind that morning of 11 March was
Mussolini’s likely reaction. Around midday, he sent a handwritten
letter, via his emissary Prince Philipp of Hesse, telling the Duce that
as a ‘son of this [Austrian] soil’ he could no longer stand back but
felt compelled to intervene to restore order in his homeland,
assuring Mussolini of his undiminished sympathy, and stressed that
nothing would alter his agreement to uphold the Brenner border.
But whatever the Duce’s reaction, Hitler had by then already put
out his directive for ‘Case Otto’, expressing his intention, should
other measures — the demands put by Seyfs Inquart to Schuschnigg —
fail, of marching into Austria. The action, under his command, was
to take place ‘without use of force in the form of a peaceful entry
welcomed by the people’.

Hitler had put the first ultimatum around 10 a.m., demanding
that Schuschnigg call off the referendum for two weeks to allow a
plebiscite similar to that in the Saarland in 1935 to be arranged.
Schuschnigg was to resign as Chancellor to make way for Sey{3-
Inquart. All restrictions on the National Socialists were to be lifted.
When Schuschnigg, around 2.45 p.m., accepted the postponement of

the plebiscite but rejected the demand to resign, Goring acted on his
Own initiative in repeating the ultimatum for the Chancellor’s
resignation and replacement by Sey{$. Looking harassed and tense,
Seyf8 put the ultimatum to the Austrian cabinet, remarking that he
was no more than ‘a girl telephone switchboard operator’. At this
point, the military preparations in Germany were continuing, ‘but
march in still uncertain’, recorded Goebbels. Plans were discussed
for making Hitler Federal President, to be acclaimed by popular
vote, ‘and then bit by bit to complete the Anschlufg’. In the
immediate future, the ‘coordination’ of Austria, not the complete
Anschlufg, was what was envisaged.

Then news came through that only part of the second ultimatum
had been accepted. Schuschnigg’s desperate plea for British help had
solicited a telegram from Lord Halifax, baldly stating: ‘His Majesty’s
Government are unable to guarantee protection.’ About 3.30 p.m.
Schuschnigg resigned. But President Wilhelm Miklas was refusing to
appoint Seyf$ Inquart as Chancellor. A further ultimatum was sent to
Vienna, expiring at 7.30 p.m. By now Goring was in full swing.
Returning to the Reich Chancellery in the early evening, Nicolaus
von Below found him ‘in his element’, constantly on the phone to
Vienna, the complete ‘master of the situation’. Just before eight
o’clock that evening, Schuschnigg made an emotional speech on the
radio, describing the ultimatum. Austria, he said, had yielded to
force. To spare bloodshed, the troops would offer no resistance.

By now, Nazi mobs were rampaging through Austrian cities,
occupying provincial government buildings. Local Nazi leaders were
hoping for Gleichschaltung through a seizure of power from within
to forestall an invasion from Germany. Goring pressed Sey{$-Inquart
to send a prearranged telegram, dictated from Berlin, asking the
German government for help to ‘restore order’ in the Austrian cities,
‘so that we have legitimation’, as Goebbels frankly admitted. At
8.48 p.m. Seyfs was still refusing to send the telegram. Goring
replied that the telegram need not be sent; all Sey{§ needed do was
to say ‘agreed’. Eventually, the telegram was sent at 9.10 p.m. It
was irrelevant. Twenty-five minutes earlier, persuaded by Goring

that he would lose face by not acting after putting the ultimatum,
Hitler had already given the Wehrmacht the order to march.
Brauchitsch had left the Reich Chancellery, the invasion order in his
pocket, depressed and worried about the response abroad. Just
before 10.30 p.m. Hitler heard the news he had been impatiently
awaiting: Mussolini was prepared to accept German intervention.
‘Please tell Mussolini I will never forget him for it, never, never,
never, come what may,’ a hugely relieved Hitler gushed over the
telephone to Philipp of Hesse. ‘If he should ever need any help or be
in any danger, he can be sure that do or die I shall stick by him,
come what may, even if the whole world rises against him,’ he
added, carried away by his elation.

At midnight, President Miklas gave in. Sey{$-Inquart was
appointed Federal Chancellor. All German demands had now been
met. But the invasion went ahead. As the American journalist
William Shirer, observing the scenes in Vienna, cynically
commented: with the invasion Hitler broke the terms of his own
ultimatum. The ‘friendly visit’ of German troops began at 5.30 a.m.

Later that morning, Hitler, accompanied by Keitel, landed in
Munich, en route for his triumphal entry into Austria, leaving
Goring to serve as his deputy in the Reich. By midday, the
cavalcade of grey Mercedes, with open tops despite the freezing
weather, had reached Mihldorf am Inn, close to the Austrian
border. General Fedor von Bock, Commander-in-Chief of the newly
formed 8th Army, hastily put together in two days out of troop
units in Bavaria, could tell Hitler that the German troops had been
received with flowers and jubilation since crossing the border two
hours earlier. Hitler listened to the report of reactions abroad by
Reich Press Chief Otto Dietrich. He did not expect either military or
political complications, and gave the order to drive on to Linz.

Back in Berlin, Frick was drafting a set of laws to accommodate
the German takeover in Austria. A full Anschlufg — the complete
incorporation of Austria, marking its disappearance as a country —
was still not envisaged; at any rate, not in the immediate future.
Elections were prescribed for 10 April, with Austria ‘under

Germany’s protection’. Hitler was to be Federal President,
determining the constitution. ‘We can then push along the
development as we want,’ commented Goebbels. Hitler himself had
not hinted at an Anschlufg in his proclamation, read out at midday
by Goebbels on German and Austrian radio, stating only that there
would be a ‘true plebiscite’ on Austria’s future and fate within a
short time.

Shortly before 4 p.m., Hitler crossed the Austrian border over the
narrow bridge at his birthplace, Braunau am Inn. The church-bells
were ringing. Tens of thousands of people, in ecstasies of joy, lined
the streets of the small town. But Hitler did not linger. Propaganda
value, not sentiment, had dictated his visit. Braunau played its brief
symbolic part. That sufficed. The cavalcade passed on its triumphal
journey to Linz.

Progress was much slower than expected because of the jubilant
crowds packing the roadsides. It was in darkness, four hours later,
that Hitler eventually reached the Upper Austrian capital. His
bodyguards pushed a way through the crowd so that he could go the
last few yards to the town hall on foot. Peals of bells rang out; the
rapturous crowd was screaming ‘Heil’; Sey{$-Inquart could hardly
make himself heard in his introductory remarks. Hitler looked
deeply moved. Tears ran down his cheeks. In his speech on the
balcony of the Linz town hall, he told the masses, constantly
interrupting him with their wild cheering, that Providence must
have singled him out to return his homeland to the German Reich.
They were witnesses that he had now fulfilled his mission.

Once more, plans were rapidly altered. He had meant to go
straight on to Vienna. But he decided to stay in Linz throughout the
next day, Sunday the 13th, and enter Vienna on the Monday. The
extraordinary reception had made a huge impact on him. He was
told that foreign newspapers were already speaking of the
‘Anschlufs’ of Austria to Germany as a fait accompli. It was in this
atmosphere that the idea rapidly took shape of annexing Austria
immediately.

In an excited mood, Hitler was heard to say that he wanted no
half-measures. Stuckart, from the Reich Ministry of the Interior, was
hurriedly summoned to Linz to draft legislation. In an interview he
gave to the British journalist Ward Price, Hitler hinted that Austria
would become a German province ‘like Bavaria or Saxony’. He
evidently pondered the matter further during the night. The next
day, 13 March, the Anschlufs, not intended before the previous
evening, was completed. Hitler’s visit to Leonding, where he laid
flowers on his parents’ grave and returned to the house where the
family had lived, meeting some acquaintances he had not seen for
thirty years, perhaps reinforced the belief, stimulated the previous
evening by his reception in Linz, that Providence had predestined
him to reunite his homeland with the Reich.

Stuckart had meanwhile arrived overnight and was drafting the
‘Law for the Reunion of Austria with the German Reich’, put
together in all haste through much toing and froing between
Stuckart in Linz and Keppler in Vienna. Around 5 p.m. the Austrian
Ministerial Council — a body by now bearing scant resemblance to
the cabinet under Schuschnigg — unanimously accepted Stuckart’s
draft with one or two minor reformulations. The meeting lasted a
mere five minutes and ended with the members of the Council
rising to their feet to give the ‘German Greeting’. The Austrian
President, Wilhelm Miklas, laid down his office about the same
time, refusing to sign the reunion law and handing his powers over
to Seyfs-Inquart. That evening, Sey{$-Inquart and Keppler drove to
Linz to confirm that the law had been accepted. Hitler signed the
law before the evening was out. Austria had become a German
province.

Immediately, the Austrian army was sworn in to Hitler. Ina
surprise move, Gauleiter Josef Btirckel, a trusted ‘old fighter’ of the
Movement but with no connections with Austria, was brought in
from the Saar to reorganize the NSDAP. Hitler was well aware of
the need to bring the party in Austria fully into line as quickly as
possible, and not to leave it in the hands of the turbulent, ill-
disciplined, and unpredictable Austrian leadership.

In mid-morning on 14 March, Hitler left Linz for Vienna.
Cheering crowds greeted the cavalcade of limousines — thirteen
police cars accompanied Hitler’s Mercedes — all the way to the
capital, where he arrived, again delayed, in the late afternoon. On
the orders of Cardinal Innitzer, Archbishop of Vienna, all the
Catholic churches in the city pealed their bells in Hitler’s honour
and flew swastika banners from their steeples — an extraordinary
gesture given the ‘Church struggle’ which had raged in the Reich
itself over the previous years. Hitler had to appear repeatedly on
the balcony of the Hotel Imperial in response to the crowd’s
continual shouts of ‘We want to see our Fuhrer.’

The next day, 15 March, in beautiful spring weather, Hitler
addressed a vast, delirious crowd, estimated at a quarter of a
million people, in Vienna’s Heldenplatz. The Viennese Nazi Party
had been impatiently expecting him to come to the capital for three
days. They had had time to ensure the preparations were complete.
Work-places were ordered to be closed; many factories and offices
had marched their employees as a group to hear the historic speech;
schools had not been open since the Saturday; Hitler Youth and girls
from the Bund Deutscher Madel were bussed in from all parts of
Austria; party formations had turned out in force. But for all the
organization, the wild enthusiasm of the immense crowd was
undeniable — and infectious. Those less enthusiastic had already
been cowed into submission by the open brutality of the Nazi
hordes, exploiting their triumph since the weekend to inflict fearful
beatings or to rob and plunder at will, and by the first waves of
mass arrests (already numbering between 10,000 and 20,000 in the
early days) orchestrated by Himmler and Heydrich, who had
arrived in Vienna on 12 March.

Ominous in Hitler’s speech was his reference to the ‘new mission’
of the ‘Eastern Marches (Ostmark) of the German People’ (as the
once independent country of Austria was now to be known) as the
‘bulwark’ against the ‘storms of the east’. He ended, to tumultuous
cheering lasting for minutes, by declaring ‘before history the entry
of my homeland into the German Reich’.

In the early evening, Hitler left Vienna and flew to Munich,
before returning next day to Berlin to another ‘hero’s welcome’.
Two days later, on 18 March, a hastily summoned Reichstag heard
his account of the events leading up to what he described as the
‘fulfilment of the supreme historical commission’. He then dissolved
the Reichstag and set new elections for 10 April. On 25 March, in
Konigsberg, he began what was to prove his last ‘election’
campaign, holding six out of fourteen major speeches in the former
Austria. In both parts of the extended Reich, the propaganda
machine once more went into overdrive. Newspapers were
prohibited from using the word ‘ja’ in any context other than in
connection with the plebiscite. When the results were announced on
10 April, 99.08 per cent in the ‘Old Reich’, and 99.75 per cent in
‘Austria’ voted ‘yes’ to the Anschlufg and to the ‘list of the Fiihrer’.
Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry congratulated itself. ‘Such an
almost 100 per cent election result is at the same time a badge of
honour for all election propagandists,’ it concluded.

From Hitler’s perspective, it was a near-perfect result. Whatever
the undoubted manipulative methods, ballot-rigging, and pressure
to conform which helped produce it, genuine support for Hitler’s
action had unquestionably been massive. Once again, a foreign-
policy triumph had strengthened his hand at home and abroad. For
the mass of the German people, Hitler once more seemed a
statesman of extraordinary virtuoso talents. For the leaders of the
western democracies, anxieties about the mounting instability of
central Europe were further magnified.

The Austrian adventure was over. Hitler’s attentions were already
moving elsewhere. Within days of returning from Vienna, he was
poring over maps together with Goebbels. ‘Czechia comes first
now,’ the Propaganda Minister recorded. ‘... And drastically, at the
next opportunity ... The Fuhrer is wonderful ... A true genius. Now
he sits for hours over the map and broods. Moving, when he says he
wants to experience the great German Reich of the Teutons himself.’

The Anschlufs was a watershed for Hitler, and for the Third
Reich. The intoxication of the crowds made him feel like a god. The

rapid improvisation of the Anschlufg there and then proved once
more — so it seemed to him — that he could do anything he wanted.
His instincts were, it seemed, always right. The western ‘powers’
were feeble. The doubters and sceptics at home were, as always,
revealed as weak and wrong. There was no one to stand in his way.

Hitler had, with the Anschlufg, created ‘Greater Germany’, now
incorporating his homeland. He was impatient for more. The
Anschlufg suggested to him that the Great Germanic Reich,
embracing all Germans and dominating the Continent of Europe, did
not have to be a long-term project, as he had once imagined. He
could create it himself. But it had to be soon. The incorporation of
Austria had seriously weakened the defences of Czechoslovakia —
the Slav state he had detested since its foundation, and one allied
with the Bolshevik arch-enemy and with France. The next step to
German dominance on the European continent beckoned.

The Anschlufs did not just set the roller-coaster of foreign
expansion moving. It gave massive impetus to the assault on
‘internal enemies’. The repression was ferocious — worse even than
it had been in Germany following the Nazi takeover in 1933.
Supporters of the fallen regime, but especially Socialists,
Communists, and Jews — rounded up under the aegis of the rising
star in the SD’s ‘Jewish Department’, Adolf Eichmann — were taken
in their thousands into ‘protective custody’.

Many other Jews were manhandled, beaten, and tortured in
horrific ordeals by Nazi thugs, looting and rampaging. Jewish shops
were plundered at will. Individual Jews were robbed on the open
streets of their money, jewellery, and fur coats. Groups of Jews,
men and women, young and old, were dragged from offices, shops,
or homes and forced to scrub the pavements in ‘cleaning squads’,
their tormentors standing over them and, watched by crowds of
onlookers screaming, ‘Work for the Jews at last,’ kicking them,
drenching them with cold, dirty water, and subjecting them to
every conceivable form of merciless humiliation.

Thousands tried to flee. Masses packed the railway stations,
trying to get out to Prague. They had the few possessions they

could carry with them ransacked by the squads of men with
swastika armbands who had assembled at the stations, ‘confiscating’
property at will, entering compartments on the trains and dragging
out arbitrarily selected victims for further mishandling and
internment. Those who left on the 1 1.1 5 p.m. night express
thought they had escaped. But they were turned back at the Czech
border. Their ordeal was only just beginning. Others tried to flee by
road. Soon, the roads to the Czech border were jammed. They
became littered with abandoned cars as their occupants, realizing
that the Czech authorities were turning back refugees at the
borders, headed into the woods to try to cross the frontier illegally
on foot.

For many, there was only one way out. Suicide among the
Viennese Jewish community became commonplace in these terrible
days.

The quest to root out ‘enemies of the people’, which in Germany
had subsided in the mid-1930s and had begun to gather new pace in
1937, was revitalized through the new ‘opportunities’ that had
opened up in Austria. The radicalized campaign would very quickly
be reimported to the ‘Old Reich’, both in the new and horrifying
wave of antisemitism in the summer of 1938, and — behind the
scenes but ultimately even more sinister — in the rapid expansion of
the SS’s involvement in looking for solutions to the ‘Jewish
Question’.

After the tremors of the Blomberg — Fritsch affair, Hitler’s
internal position was now stronger than ever. The vast majority of
officers were, as regards the Anschlufg, of one mind with the people:
they could only approve and — if sometimes begrudgingly — admire
Hitler’s latest triumph. Among the mass of the population, ‘the
German miracle’ brought about by Hitler released what was
described as ‘an elemental frenzy of enthusiasm’ - once it was clear
that the western powers would again stand by and do nothing, and
that ‘our Fuhrer has pulled it off without bloodshed’. It would be the
last time that the German people — now with the addition of their
cousins to the east whose rapid disillusionment soon dissipated the

wild euphoria with which many of them had greeted Hitler —- would
feel the threat of war lifted so rapidly from them through a foreign-
policy coup completed within days and presented as a fait accompli.
The next crisis, over the Sudetenland, would drag over months and
have them in near-panic over the likelihood of war. And if Hitler
had had his way, there would have been war.

Down to the Anschlufs, the major triumphs in foreign policy had
been in line with the revisionist and nationalist expectations of all
powerful interests in the Reich, and quite especially those of the
army. The methods — on which the army, the Foreign Office, and
others often looked askance — were Hitlerian. The timing had been
determined by Hitler. The decisions to act were his alone. But in
each case there had been powerful backing, as well as some
hesitancy, among his advisers. And in each case, he was reflecting
diverse currents of revisionist expression. The immense popularity
of his triumphs in all sections of the political élite and among the
masses of the population testified to the underlying consensus
behind the revisionism. The earlier crises had also all been of brief
duration. The tension had in each case been short-lived, the success
rapidly attained. And in each case, the popular jubilation was in part
an expression of relief that the western powers had not intervened,
that the threat of another war — something which sent shivers of
horror down the spines of most ordinary people — had been averted.
The resulting popularity and prestige that accrued to Hitler drew
heavily upon his ‘triumphs without bloodshed’. The weakness and
divisions of the western powers had in each case been the platform
for Hitler’s bloodless coups.

For the first time, in the summer of 1938, Hitler’s foreign policy
went beyond revisionism and national integration, even if the
western powers did not grasp this. Whatever his public veneer of
concern about the treatment of the Sudeten Germans, there was no
doubt at all to the ruling groups in Germany aware of Hitler’s

thinking that he was aiming not just at the incorporation of the
Sudetenland in the German Reich, but at destroying the state of
Czechoslovakia itself. By the end of May this aim, and the timing
envisaged to accomplish it, had been outlined to the army
leadership. It meant war — certainly against Czechoslovakia, and
probably (so it seemed to others), despite Hitler’s presumption of
the contrary, against the western powers. Hitler, it became
unmistakably plain, actually wanted war.

The sheer recklessness of courting disaster by the wholly
unnecessary (in their view) risk of war at this time against the
western powers — which they thought Germany in its current state
of preparation could not win — appalled and horrified a number of
those who knew what Hitler had in mind.

It was not the prospect of destroying Czechoslovakia that
alienated them. To German nationalist eyes, Czechoslovakia could
only be seen as a major irritant occupying a strategically crucial
area. Coloured in addition by anti-Slav prejudice, there was little
love lost for a democracy, hostile to the Reich, whose destruction
would bring major advantages for Germany’s military and economic
dominance of central Europe. The army had already planned in
1937 for the possibility of a pre-emptive strike against
Czechoslovakia — ‘Case Green’ — to counter the possibility of the
Czechs joining in from the east if their allies, the French, attacked
the Reich from the west. As the prospect of a war with the French,
something taken extremely seriously in the mid-1930s, had receded,
‘Case Green’ had been amended a month after the ‘Hof$bach
meeting’ of 5 November 1937 to take account of likely
circumstances in which the Wehrmacht could invade Czechoslovakia
to solve the problem of ‘living space’.

In economic terms, too, the fall of Czechoslovakia offered an
enticing prospect. Goring, his staff directing the Four-Year Plan, and
the leaders of the arms industry, were for their part casting greedy
eyes on the raw materials and armaments plants of Czechoslovakia.
The economic pressures for expansion accorded fully with the
power-political aims of the regime’s leadership. Those who had

argued for an alternative economic strategy, most of all of course
Schacht, had by now lost their influence. Goring was the dominant
figure. And in Goring’s dreams of German dominion in south-eastern
Europe, the acquisition of Czechoslovakia was plainly pivotal.

But neither military strategy nor economic necessity compelled a
Czech crisis in 1938. And even Goring, keen as he was to see the
end of the Czech state, was anxious, as were others in the upper
echelons of the regime, to avoid what seemed that almost certain
consequence of any move against Czechoslovakia: war against the
western powers.

It was the vision of national disaster that led for the first time to
the tentative emergence of significant strands of opposition to what
was regarded as Hitler’s madness. In the army leadership (still
smarting from the Fritsch scandal), in the Foreign Office, and in
other high places, the germs of resistance were planted among those
certain that Germany was being driven headlong into catastrophe.
In the military, the leading opponents of Hitler’s high-risk policy
emerged as General Beck, who resigned as Chief of Staff in the
summer, and Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr
(military intelligence). In the Foreign Office, the State Secretary
Ernst von Weizsacker was at the forefront of those in opposition to
the policy supported avidly by his immediate superior, Foreign
Minister von Ribbentrop. Among civilians with inside knowledge of
what was going on, Carl Goerdeler, the former Reich Price
Commissar, used his extensive foreign contacts to warn about
Hitler’s aims.

Nor was there any popular pressure for a foreign adventure, let
alone one which was thought likely to bring war with the western
powers. Among ordinary people, excluded from the deliberations in
high places which kept Europe on the thinnest of tightropes
between war and peace in September, the long-drawn-out crisis
over Czechoslovakia, lasting throughout the late spring and
summer, unlike earlier crises allowed time for the anxieties about
war to gather momentum. The acute tension produced what was
described as a ‘real war psychosis’. No love was lost on the Czechs.

And the relentless propaganda about their alleged persecution of the
German minority was not without impact. There were indeed some
feelings of real gung-ho aggression, though these were largely
confined to gullible younger Germans, who had not lived through
the World War. The overwhelming sentiment was a fervent desire
that war should be avoided and peace preserved. For the first time
there was a hint of lack of confidence in Hitler’s policy. Most looked
to him to preserve peace, not take Germany into a new war. But
this time, both to the leading actors in the drama and to the millions
looking on anxiously, war looked a more likely outcome than peace.

Among those with power and influence, the most forthright
supporter of war to destroy Czechoslovakia was the new Foreign
Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, an entirely different entity from
the displaced conservative, von Neurath. Ribbentrop was more than
keen to stamp his imprint on the Foreign Office - and to make up
for the embarrassment he had sustained when, largely at Goring’s
doing, he had been sidelined in London and allowed to play no part
in the Austrian triumph that his arch-rival in foreign policy had been
instrumental in orchestrating. He provided Hitler with his main
backing in these months. His hatred of Britain — the country which
had spurned and ridiculed him — as well as his fawning devotion to
the Fiihrer made him the most hawkish of the hawks, a warmonger
second only to Hitler himself. When he was not directly spurring on
Hitler, he was doing his utmost to shore up the conviction that,
when it came to it, Britain would not fight, that any war would be a
localized one.

For all Ribbentrop’s influence, however, there could be no doubt
that the crisis that brought Europe to the very brink of war in the
summer of 1938 was instigated and directed by Hitler himself. And
unlike the rapid improvisation and breakneck speed which had
characterized previous crises, this one was consciously devised to
escalate over a period of months.

Until 1938, Hitler’s moves in foreign policy had been bold, but
not reckless. He had shown shrewd awareness of the weakness of
his opponents, a sure instinct for exploiting divisions and

uncertainty. His sense of timing had been excellent, his combination
of bluff and blackmail effective, his manipulation of propaganda to
back his coups masterly. He had gone further and faster than
anyone could have expected in revising the terms of Versailles and
upturning the post-war diplomatic settlement. From the point of
view of the western powers, his methods were, to say the least,
unconventional diplomacy — raw, brutal, unpalatable; but his aims
were recognizably in accord with traditional German nationalist
clamour. Down to and including the Anschlufg, Hitler had proved a
consummate nationalist politician. During the Sudeten crisis, some
sympathy for demands to incorporate the German-speaking areas in
the Reich — for another Anschlufg of sorts — still existed among those
ready to swallow Goebbels’s propaganda about the maltreatment of
the Sudeten Germans by the Czechs, or at any rate prepared to
accept that a further nationality problem was in need of resolution.
It took the crisis and its outcome to expose the realization that
Hitler would stop at nothing.

The spring of 1938 marked the phase in which Hitler’s obsession
with accomplishing his ‘mission’ in his own lifetime started to
overtake cold political calculation. The sense of his own infallibility,
massively boosted by the triumph of the Anschlufg, underscored his
increased reliance on his own will, matched by his diminished
readiness to listen to countervailing counsel. That he had invariably
been proved right in his assessment of the weakness of the western
powers in the past, usually in the teeth of the caution of his advisers
in the army and Foreign Office, convinced him that his current
evaluation was unerringly correct. He felt the western powers
would do nothing to defend Czechoslovakia. At the same time, this
strengthened his conviction that the Reich’s position relative to the
western powers could only worsen as their inevitable build-up of
arms began to catch up with that of Germany. To remain inactive —
a recurring element in the way he thought — was, he asserted, not
an option: it would merely play into the hands of his enemies.
Therefore, he characteristically reasoned: act without delay to
retain the initiative.

The time was ripe in his view to strike against Czechoslovakia.
Until Czechoslovakia was eliminated — this was the key strategic
element in Hitler’s idea - Germany would be incapable of taking
action either in the east or in the west. He had moved from a
position of a foreign policy supported by Great Britain to one where
he was prepared to act without Britain, and, if need be, against
Britain. Despite the forebodings of others, war against
Czechoslovakia in his view carried few risks. And if the western
powers, contrary to expectation, were foolish enough to become
involved, Germany would defeat them.

More important even than why Hitler was in such a hurry to
destroy Czechoslovakia is why he was by this time in a position to
override or ignore weighty objections and to determine that
Germany should be taken to the very brink of general European
war. Decisive in this was the process, which we have followed, of
the expansion of his power, relative to other agencies of power in
the regime, to the point where, by spring 1938, it had freed itself
from all institutional constraints and had established unchallenged
supremacy over all sections of the ‘power cartel’. The five years of
Hitler’s highly personalized form of rule had eroded all semblance
of collective involvement in policy-making. This fragmentation at
one and the same time rendered the organization of any opposition
within the power-élite almost impossible — not to speak of any
attached dangers to life and liberty — and inordinately strengthened
Hitler’s own power. The scope for more cautious counsel to apply
the brakes had sharply diminished. The constant Hobbesian ‘war of
all against all’, the competing power fiefdoms that characterized the
National Socialist regime, took place at the level below Hitler,
enhancing his extraordinary position as the fount of all authority
and dividing both individual and sectional interests of the different
power entities (the Movement, the state bureaucracy, the army, big
business, the police, and the sub-branches of each). Hitler was,
therefore, as the sole linchpin, able internally to deal, as in foreign
policy, through bilateral relations — offering his support here,
denying it there, remaining the sole arbiter, even when he preferred

(or felt compelled) to let matters ride and let his subordinates battle
it out among themselves. It was less a planned strategy of ‘divide
and rule’ than an inevitable consequence of Fithrer authority.
Without any coordinating bodies to unify policy, each sectional
interest in the Third Reich could thrive only with the legitimacy of
the Fiihrer’s backing. Each one inevitably, therefore, ‘worked
towards the Fuhrer’ in order to gain or sustain that backing,
ensuring thereby that his power grew still further and that his own
ideological obsessions were promoted.

The inexorable disintegration of coherent structures of rule was
therefore not only a product of the all-pervasive Fuhrer cult
reflecting and embellishing Hitler’s absolute supremacy, but at the
same time underpinned the myth of the all-seeing, all-knowing
infallible Leader, elevating it to the very principle of government
itself. Moreover, as we have witnessed throughout, Hitler had in the
process swallowed the Fuhrer cult himself, hook, line, and sinker.
He was the most ardent believer in his own infallibility and destiny.
It was not a good premiss for rational decision-making.

The compliance of all sections of the regime in the growth of the
Fuhrer cult, the exemption made for Hitler himself even by
vehement internal critics of the party or Gestapo, and the full
awareness of the immense popularity of the ‘great Leader’, all
contributed to making it extraordinarily difficult by summer 1938 -
the first time that deep anxieties about the course of his leadership
surfaced — now to contemplate withdrawing support, let alone take
oppositional action of any kind.

In any case, the extent of opposition to plans for an assault on
Czechoslovakia should not be exaggerated. From within the regime,
only the army had the potential to block Hitler. The Blomberg-
Fritsch affair had certainly left a legacy of anger, distaste, and
distrust among the army leadership. But this was directed less at
Hitler personally, than at the leadership of the SS and police.

Following the changes of February 1938, the army’s own
position, in relation to Hitler, had weakened. In the process, the
army leadership had been transformed into an adjunct of Hitler’s

power rather than the ‘state within the state’ which it had
effectively been since Bismarck’s era. By the summer of 1938,
whatever the anxieties about the risk of war with the western
powers, the leadership of the armed forces was divided within
itself. Hitler could depend upon unquestioning support from Keitel
and Jodl in the High Command of the Wehrmacht. Brauchitsch
could be relied upon to keep the army in line, whatever the
reservations of some of the generals. Raeder was, as always, fully
behind Hitler and already preparing the navy for eventual war with
Britain. The head of the Luftwaffe, Goring, fearful of such a war and
seeing it as the negation of his own conception of German
expansionist policy, nevertheless bowed axiomatically to the
Fuhrer’s superior authority at all points where his approach started
to diverge from Hitler’s own. When Beck felt compelled to resign as
Chief of Staff, therefore, he stirred no broad protest within the
army, let alone in the other branches of the Wehrmacht. Instead, he
isolated himself and henceforth formed his links with equally
isolated and disaffected individuals within the armed forces, the
Foreign Office, and other state ministries who began to contemplate
ways of removing Hitler. They were well aware that they were
swimming against a strong tide. Whatever doubts and worries there
might be, they knew that the consensus behind Hitler within the
power-élites was unbroken. They were conscious, too, that from the
masses, despite mounting anxieties about war, Hitler could still
summon immense reserves of fanatical support. The prospects of
successful resistance were, therefore, not good.

It was scarcely surprising, then, that there would be
overwhelming compliance and no challenge to Hitler’s leadership,
or to his dangerous policy, as the crisis unfolded throughout the
summer. Despite reservations, all sections of the regime’s power-
élite had by this point come to bind themselves to Hitler — whether
to flourish or perish.

Ill

The international constellation also played completely into Hitler’s
hands. Czechoslovakia, despite its formal treaties with France and
the Soviet Union, was exposed and friendless. France’s vacillation
during the summer reflected a desperation to avoid having to fulfil
its treaty obligations to Czechoslovakia through military
involvement for which there was neither the will nor the
preparation. The French were fearful of Czechoslovakia coming
under German control. But they were even more fearful of
becoming embroiled in a war to defend the Czechs. The Soviet
Union, in any case preoccupied with its internal upheavals, could
only help the defence of Czechoslovakia if its troops were permitted
to cross Polish or Romanian soil — a prospect which could be ruled
out. Poland and Hungary both looked greedily to the possibility of
their own revisionist gains at the expense of a dismembered
Czechoslovakia. Italy, having conceded to the rapidly emerging
senior partner in the Axis over the key issue of Austria, had no
obvious interest in propping up Czechoslovakia. Great Britain,
preoccupied with global commitments and problems in different
parts of its Empire, and aware of its military unreadiness for an
increasingly likely conflict with Germany, was anxious at all costs to
avoid prematurely being drawn into a war over a nationality
problem in a central European country to which it was bound by no
treaty obligations. The British knew the French were not prepared
to help the Czechs. The government were still giving Hitler the
benefit of the doubt, ready to believe that designs on Sudeten
territory did not amount to ‘international power lust’ or mean that
he was envisaging a future attack on France and Britain. Beyond
this, it was accepted in London that the Czechs were indeed
oppressing the Sudeten German minority. Pressure on the Czechs to
comply with Hitler’s demands was an inevitable response — and one
backed by the French.

On top of its increasingly hopeless international position,
Czechoslovakia’s internal fragility also greatly assisted Hitler. Not
just the clamour of the Sudeten Germans, but the designs of the
Slovaks for their own autonomy placed the Czech government in an

impossible situation. Undermined from without and within, the only
new democracy surviving from the post-war settlement was about
to be deserted by its ‘friends’ and devoured by its enemies.

Within two weeks of the Anschlufg, in discussions in Berlin with
the Sudeten German leader Konrad Henlein, Hitler was indicating
that the Czech question would be solved ‘before long’. He also
prescribed the general strategy of stipulating demands which the
Prague government could not meet — vital to prevent the
Czechoslovakian government at any stage falling in line with British
pressure to accommodate the Sudeten Germans. Henlein wasted no
time in putting forward his demands, amounting to autonomy for
Sudeten Germans, on 24 April at the Congress of the Sudeten
German Party at Karlsbad (Karlovy Vary). One demand to be kept
up Henlein’s sleeve, which Hitler was certain from his knowledge of
the Austria-Hungarian multinational state could never be accepted,
was for German regiments within the Czechoslovakian army. In
Germany itself, the strategy was to turn up the volume of
propaganda at the alleged oppression of the Sudeten Germans by
the Czechs. If necessary, incidents to fuel the agitation could be
manufactured. Militarily, Hitler was hoping to prevent British
intervention, and was certain the French would not act alone. A key
deterrent, in his view, was the building of a 400-mile concrete
fortification (planned to include ‘dragon’s teeth’ anti-tank devices
and gun emplacements, with over 11,000 bunkers and reinforced
dug-outs) along Germany’s western border — the ‘Westwall’ — to
provide a significant obstruction to any French invasion. The direct
interest which Hitler took in the Westwall and the urgency in
completing the fortifications were directly related to the question of
timing in any blow aimed at the Czechs. At this stage, in late March
and April 1938, Hitler evidently had no precise time-scale in mind
for the destruction of Czechoslovakia.

This was still the case when Hitler instructed Keitel, on 21 April,
to draw up plans for military action against Czechoslovakia. Hitler
indicated that he did not intend to attack Czechoslovakia in the near
future unless circumstances within the country or fortuitous

international developments offered an opportunity. This would then
have to be seized so rapidly — military action would have to prove
decisive within four days — that the western powers would realize
the pointlessness of intervention. Keitel and Jodl were in no hurry
to work out the operational plan which, when eventually presented
to Hitler in draft on 20 May, still represented what Keitel had taken
to be Hitler’s intentions a month earlier. ‘It is not my intention to
smash Czechoslovakia by military action within the immediate
future,’ the draft began.

In the interim, Hitler had reacted angrily to a memorandum
composed on 5 May by army Chief of Staff General Beck,
emphasizing Germany’s military incapacity to win a long war, and
warning of the dangers of British intervention in the event of
military action against Czechoslovakia that year. Hitler was even
more scathing when Goring reported to him how little progress had
been made on the Westwall (where construction work had been
under the direction of Army Group Command 2, headed by General
Wilhelm Adam). He accused the General Staff of sabotaging his
plans, removed the army’s construction chiefs, and put Fritz Todt —
his civil engineering expert who, since 1933, had masterminded the
building of the motorways — in charge. It was an example of Hitler’s
increasingly high-handed way of dealing with the army leadership.
Hitler still recalled what he saw as the army’s obstructionism as late
as 1942.

The question of Mussolini’s attitude towards German action over
Czechoslovakia had been high on Hitler’s agenda during his state
visit to Italy at the beginning of May. Hitler had done much to
dispel any initial coolness towards the visit with his speech in Rome
on the evening of 7 May in which he enthused over the natural
‘alpine border’ providing a ‘clear separation of the living spaces of
the two nations’. This public renunciation of any claim on the South
Tyrol was no more than Hitler had been stating since the mid-
1920s. But, coming so soon after the Anschlufs, it was important in
assuaging the Italians, not least since Hitler was anxious to sound
them out over Czechoslovakia. The soundings were, from Hitler’s

point of view, the most successful part of the visit. He took
Mussolini’s remarks as encouragement to proceed against the
Czechs. State Secretary von Weizsacker noted that Italy intended to
stay neutral in any war between Germany and Czechoslovakia.
Diplomatically, Hitler had achieved what he wanted from the visit.
At this point the ‘Weekend Crisis’ intervened.

Reports reaching the French and British embassies and the Prague
government on 19-20 May of German troop movements near the
Czech border were treated seriously, given the shrill German anti-
Czech propaganda and the tension in the Sudetenland on account of
the imminent local elections there. The Czechoslovakian
government responded to what they took to be a threat of imminent
invasion by partially mobilizing their military reserves — close on
180,000 men. Tension rose still further when two Sudeten Germans
were killed in an incident involving the Czech police. Meanwhile,
Keitel’s explicit reassurance to the British Ambassador Henderson
that the movements were no more than routine spring manoeuvres,
which had been given to the press, had led to a furious tirade by
Ribbentrop, incensed that Henderson had not gone through proper
diplomatic channels in publishing the information, and threatening
that Germany would fight as it had done in 1914 should war break
out.

This had the effect of stirring genuine alarm in the British
Ambassador, worried that he had been misled by Keitel, and that a
German invasion of Czechoslovakia was imminent. On the
afternoon of Saturday, 21 May, Henderson was instructed by the
British Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax to inform Ribbentrop that the
French were bound to intervene in the event of an attack on
Czechoslovakia, and that the Germans should not depend upon the
British standing by. Ribbentrop’s hysterical reply was scarcely
reassuring: ‘If France were really so crazy as to attack us, it would
lead to perhaps the greatest defeat in French history, and if Britain
were to join her, then once again we should have to fight to the
death.’ By the Sunday, 22 May, however, British reconnaissance on

the borders had revealed nothing untoward. It had been a false
alarm.

The crisis blew over as quickly as it had started. But Hitler was
affronted by the loss of German prestige. Keitel later recalled Hitler
stating that he was not prepared to tolerate ‘such a provocation’ by
the Czechs, and demanding the fastest possible preparations for a
strike. It was not as a result of the crisis that Hitler resolved to
crush Czechoslovakia before the year was out. But the crisis
accelerated matters. The blow to pride reinforced his determination
to act as soon as possible. Delay was ruled out.

After days of brooding over the issue at the Berghof, pondering
the advice of his military leaders that Germany was ill-equipped for
an early strike against the Czechs, Hitler returned to Berlin and
summoned a meeting of his top generals, together with leading
figures from the Foreign Ministry, for 28 May. He told his generals
bluntly: ‘I am utterly determined that Czechoslovakia should
disappear from the map.’ He claimed Germany was stronger than in
1914. He pointed to the train of successes since 1933. But there was
no such thing as a lasting state of contentment. Life was a constant
struggle. And Germany needed living space in Europe, and in
colonial possessions. The current generation had to solve the
problem. France and Britain would remain hostile to an expansion
of German power. Czechoslovakia was Germany’s most dangerous
enemy in the event of conflict with the West. Therefore it was
necessary to eliminate Czechoslovakia. He gave the incomplete
state of Czech fortifications, the underdeveloped British and French
armaments programmes, and the advantageous international
situation as reasons for early action. The western fortifications were
to be drastically speeded up. These would provide the framework
for a ‘lightning march into Czechoslovakia’.

Two days later, the revised ‘Case Green’ was ready. Its basic lines
were unchanged from those drawn up earlier in the month by Keitel
and Jodl. But the preamble now ran: ‘It is my unalterable decision
to smash Czechoslovakia by military action in the foreseeable
future.’ Keitel’s covering note laid down that preparations must be

complete by 1 October at the latest. From that date on, Hitler was
determined to ‘exploit every favourable political opportunity’ to
accomplish his aim. It was a decision for war — if need be, even
against the western powers.

Chief of Staff Beck responded with two memoranda of 29 May
and 3 June, highly critical both of Hitler’s political assumptions
with regard to Britain and France, and of the operational directives
for ‘Case Green’. The ‘cardinal point’ (as he put it) of disagreement
was about the prospect of a war against France and Britain which,
Beck was certain, Germany would lose. What only gradually
became clear to Beck was how far he had isolated himself even in
the army’s own high command. In particular, the head of the army,
Brauchitsch, though sharing some of Beck’s reservations, would
undertake nothing which might appear to challenge or criticize
Hitler’s plans. The distance between Brauchitsch and Beck became
more marked. Increasingly, the head of the army looked to Beck’s
deputy, General Franz Halder.

Beck’s own position, and the force of his operational arguments,
weakened notably in mid-June when the results of war games
demonstrated, in contrast to his grim prognostications, that
Czechoslovakia would in all probability be overrun within eleven
days, with the consequence that troops could rapidly be sent to fight
on the western front. Increasingly despairing and isolated, Beck
went so far in summer as to advocate collective resignation of the
military leadership to force Hitler to give way, to be followed by a
purge of the ‘radicals’ responsible for the high-risk international
adventurism. ‘The soldierly duty [of the highest leaders of the
Wehrmacht],’ he wrote on 16 July 1938, ‘has a limit at the point
where their knowledge, conscience, and responsibility prohibits the
execution of an order. If their advice and warnings in such a
situation are not listened to, they have the right and duty to the
people and to history to resign from their posts. If they all act with
a united will, the deployment of military action is impossible. They
will thereby have saved their Fatherland from the worst, from
destruction ... Extraordinary times demand extraordinary actions.’

It proved impossible to win over Brauchitsch to the idea of any
generals’ ultimatum to Hitler, even though the army Commander-in-
Chief accepted much of Beck’s military analysis and shared his fears
of western intervention. At a meeting of top generals summoned for
4 August, Brauchitsch did not deliver the speech which Beck had
prepared for him. Instead, distancing himself from the Chief of the
General Staff, he had Beck read out his own memorandum of 16
July, with its highly pessimistic assessment of eventualities
following an invasion of Czechoslovakia. Most of those present
agreed that Germany could not win a war against the western
powers. But Reichenau, speaking ‘from his personal knowledge of
the Fuhrer’, warned against individual generals approaching Hitler
with such an argument; it would have the reverse effect to that
which they wanted. And General Ernst Busch questioned whether it
was the business of soldiers to intervene in political matters. As
Brauchitsch recognized, those present opposed the risk of a war
over Czechoslovakia. He himself commented that a new world war
would bring the end of German culture. But there was no agreement
on what practical consequences should follow. Colonel-General Gerd
von Rundstedt, one of the most senior and respected officers, was
unwilling to provoke a new crisis between Hitler and the army
through challenging him on his war-risk policy. Lieutenant-General
Erich von Manstein, Commander of the 18th Infantry Division, who
would later distinguish himself as a military tactician of unusual
calibre, advised Beck to rid himself of the burden of responsibility —
a matter for the political leadership — and play a full part in
securing success against Czechoslovakia.

Brauchitsch, spineless though he was, was plainly not alone in his
unwillingness to face Hitler with an ultimatum. The reality was that
there was no collective support for a frontal challenge. Brauchitsch
contented himself with passing on Beck’s memorandum to Hitler via
one of his adjutants. When Hitler heard what had taken place at the
meeting, he was incandescent. Brauchitsch was summoned to the
Berghof and subjected to such a ferocious high-decibel verbal

assault that those sitting on the terrace below the open windows of
Hitler’s room felt embarrassed enough to move inside.

Hitler responded by summoning — an unorthodox step — not the
top military leadership, but a selective group of the second tier of
senior officers, those who might be expecting rapid promotion in
the event of a military conflict, to the Berghof for a meeting on 10
August. He was evidently hoping to gain influence over his staff
chiefs through their subordinates. But he was disappointed. His
harangue, lasting several hours, left his audience — which was fully
acquainted with the content of Beck’s July memorandum - still
unconvinced. The crisis of confidence between Hitler and the army
general staff had reached serious levels. At the same time, the
assembled officers were divided among themselves, with some of
them increasingly critical of Beck.

The Chief of the General Staff made a last attempt to persuade
Brauchitsch to take a firm stance against Hitler. It was whistling in
the wind. On 18 August, Beck finally tendered the resignation he
had already prepared a month earlier. Even then, he missed a last
trick. He accepted Hitler’s request — ‘for foreign-policy reasons’ —
not to publicize his resignation. A final opportunity to turn the
unease running through the army, and through the German people,
into an open challenge to the political leadership of the Reich — and
when Beck knew that only Ribbentrop, and perhaps Himmler, fully
backed Hitler — was lost. Beck’s path into fundamental resistance
was a courageous one. But in summer 1938 he gradually became, at
least as regards political strategy, an isolated figure in the military
leadership. As he himself saw it several months later: ‘I warned —
and in the end I was alone.’ Ironically, he had been more
responsible than any other individual for supplying Hitler with the
military might which the Dictator could not wait to use.

Hitler was by this time, therefore, assured of the compliance of
the military, even if they were reluctant rather than enthusiastic in
their backing for war against the Czechs, and even if relations were
tense and distrustful. And as long as the generals fell into line, his
own position was secure, his policy unchallengeable.

As it transpired, his reading of international politics turned out to
be closer to the mark than that of Beck and the generals. In the
guessing-and second-guessing political poker-game that ran through
the summer, the western powers were anxious to avoid war at all
costs, while the east European neighbours of Czechoslovakia were
keen to profit from any war but unwilling to take risks. By
midsummer, Ribbentrop regarded the die as cast. He told
Weizsacker ‘that the Fuhrer was firmly resolved to settle the Czech
affair by force of arms’. Mid-October was the latest possible date
because of flying conditions. ‘The other powers would definitely not
do anything about it and if they did we would take them on as well
and win.’

Hitler himself spent much of the summer at the Berghof. Despite
the Sudeten crisis, his daily routine differed little from previous
years: he got up late, went for walks, watched films, and relaxed in
the company of his regular entourage and favoured visitors like
Albert Speer. Whether on the basis of newspaper reports, or through
information fed to him by those able to gain access, he intervened —
sometimes quirkily — in an array of minutiae: punishment for traffic
offences, altering the base of a statue, considerations of whether all
cigarettes should be made nicotine-free, or the type of holes to be
put into flagpoles. He also interfered directly in the course of
justice, ordering the death penalty for the perpetrator of a series of
highway robberies, and the speediest possible conviction for the
alleged serial killer of a number of women.

But the Czechoslovakian crisis was never far away. Hitler was
preoccupied with the operational planning for ‘Green’. His
confidence in his generals dwindled as his anger at their scepticism
towards his plans mounted. He also involved himself in the smallest
detail of the building of the Westwall — a key component in his
plans to overrun the Czechs without French intervention and the
bluff to discourage Germany’s western neighbours from even
attempting to cross the Rhine. He was still expecting the
fortifications to be complete by the autumn — by the onset of frost,
as he told Goebbels — at which point he reckoned Germany would

be unassailable from the west. But the sluggish progress made by
the army made him furious. When General Adam claimed that the
extra 12,000 bunkers he had ordered were an impossibility, Hitler
flew into a rage, declaring that for Todt the word ‘impossible’ did
not exist. He felt driven to dictate a lengthy memorandum, drawing
on his own wartime experiences, laying down his notions of the
nature of the fortifications to be erected, down to sleeping, eating,
drinking, and lavatory arrangements in the bunkers — since new
recruits in their first battle often suffered from diarrhoea, he
claimed to recall. The Westwall had priority over all other major
building projects. By the end of August, 148,000 workers and
50,000 army sappers were stationed at the fortifications. Autobahn
and housing construction had been temporarily halted to make use
of the workers.

By this time, the end of August, the crisis was beginning to move
towards its climacteric phase. When Goebbels saw him on the
Obersalzberg on the last day of August, Hitler was in a determined
and optimistic mood: he did not think Britain would intervene. ‘He
knows what he wants and goes straight towards his goal,’ remarked
Goebbels. By now, Goebbels too knew that the planned time for
action was October.

Ordinary people were, of course, wholly unaware of the planned
aggression. The weeks of anti-Czech propaganda, often near-
hysterical in tone, had shaped the impression that the issue was
about the despicable persecution of the German minority, not the
military destruction of Czechoslovakia. But whether or not the
Sudeten Germans came ‘home into the Reich’ was, for the
overwhelming majority of the population, less important than
avoiding the war which Hitler was determined to have. ‘The war
psychosis is growing,’ noted Goebbels. ‘A gloomy mood lies over
the land. Everyone awaits what is coming.’ Reports on popular
opinion compiled by the SD and other agencies uniformly registered
similar sentiments. ‘There exists in the broadest sections of the
population,’ ran one report in early September, ‘the earnest concern

that in the long or short run a war will put an end to the economic
prosperity and have a terrible end for Germany.’

During August, the British had indirectly exerted pressure on the
Czechs to comply with Sudeten German demands through the
mission of Lord Runciman, aimed at playing for time, mediating
between the Sudeten German Party and the Prague government,
and solving the Sudeten question within the framework of the
continued existence of the state of Czechoslovakia. By the end of
the month, the British government had learnt from their contacts
with oppositional sources in Germany that Hitler intended to attack
Czechoslovakia within weeks. The crucial moment, they imagined,
would probably follow Hitler’s speech to the Reich Party Rally in
Nuremberg in mid-September. On 30 August, in an emergency
meeting, the British cabinet declined to offer a formal warning to
Hitler of likely British intervention in the event of German
aggression. Instead, it was decided to apply further pressure on the
Czechs, who were effectively given an ultimatum: accept Henlein’s
programme to give virtual autonomy for the Sudeten Germans
within the Czechoslovakian state, as laid down in his Karlsbad
speech in April, or be doomed. On 5 September, President Eduard
Benes, faced with such an unenviable choice, bowed to the pressure.

This in fact left Henlein and the Sudeten German leadership in a
predicament: entirely against expectations, their demands had been
met almost in their entirety. With that, Hitler’s pretext for war was
undermined. Desperate for an excuse to break off negotiations with
the Czechs, the Sudeten Germans grasped at an incident in which
the Czech police manhandled three local Germans accused of spying
and smuggling weapons. It was enough to keep matters on the boil
until Hitler’s big speech on 12 September.

Increasingly worried though the Sudeten German leaders
themselves were about the prospect of war, Henlein’s party was
simply dancing to Hitler’s tune. Hitler had told Henlein’s right-hand

man, Karl Hermann Frank, as early as 26 August to instigate
provocative ‘incidents’. He followed it up with instructions to carry
out the ‘incidents’ on 4 September. He had left Frank in no doubt at
all of his intentions. ‘Fiihrer is determined on war,’ Frank had
reported. Hitler had verbally lashed BeneS, saying he wanted him
taken alive and would himself string him up. Three days later, on
29 August, it was known, from what was emanating from Hitler’s
entourage, that Czech compliance, under British pressure, to the
Karlsbad demands would no longer be sufficient. ‘So the Fuhrer
wants war,’ was the conclusion drawn by Helmuth Groscurth, head
of Department II of the Abwehr.

When he met Henlein at the Berghof on 2 September, however,
Hitler was giving little away. He implied to the Sudeten leader that
he would act that month, though specified no date. Knowing that
Hitler had a military solution in mind, Henlein nevertheless told his
British contact, Frank Ashton-Gwatkin, Runciman’s assistant, that
the Fihrer favoured a peaceful settlement — information which
further nourished appeasement ambitions. The reality was very
different: at a military conference at the Berghof on the day after
his meeting with Henlein, Hitler determined details of ‘Case Green’,
the attack on Czechoslovakia, ready to be launched on 1 October.

Hitler was by this stage impervious to the alarm signals being
registered in diplomatic circles. When Admiral Canaris returned
from Italy with reports that the Italians were urgently advising
against war, and would not participate themselves, Hitler took them
simply as a reflection of the divisions between the general staff and
the Duce, similar to those he was experiencing with the army in
Germany. He remained adamant that Britain was bluffing, playing
for time, insufficiently armed, and would stay neutral. Warnings
about the poor state of the German navy met with the same
response. The present time, with the harvest secured, he continued
to argue, was the most favourable for military action. By December,
it would be too late. He was equally dismissive about warning
noises from France. When the German Ambassador in Paris,
Johannes von Welczek, reported his strong impression that France

would reluctantly be obliged to honour the obligation to the Czechs,
Hitler simply pushed the report to one side, saying it did not
interest him. Hearing of this, Lord Halifax pointed it out to the
British cabinet as evidence that ‘Herr Hitler was possibly or even
probably mad.’

With German propaganda reaching fever-pitch, Hitler delivered
his long-awaited and much feared tirade against the Czechs at the
final assembly of the Party Congress on 12 September. Venomous
though the attacks on the Czechs were, with an unmistakable threat
if ‘self-determination’ were not granted, Hitler fell short of
demanding the handing over of the Sudetenland, or a plebiscite to
determine the issue. In Germany there was an air of impending war
and great tension. The anxious Czechs thought war and peace hung
in the balance that day. But in Hitler’s timetable, it was still over
two weeks too early.

Even so, Hitler’s speech triggered a wave of disturbances in the
Sudeten region. These incidents, and the near-panic which had
gripped the French government, persuaded Neville Chamberlain
that, if the German offensive expected for late September were to
be avoided, face-to-face talks with Hitler — an idea worked out
already in late August — were necessary. On the evening of 14
September, the sensational news broke in Germany: Chamberlain
had requested a meeting with Hitler, who had invited him to the
Obersalzberg for midday on the following day.

Early on the morning of 15 September, the sixty-nine-year-old
British Prime Minister — a prim, reserved, austere figure — took off
from Croydon airport in a twin-engined Lockheed, hoping, as he
said, to secure peace. He was cheered by the Munich crowds as he
was driven in an open car from the airport to the station to be taken
in Hitler’s special train to Berchtesgaden. It was raining, the sky
dark and threatening, by the time Chamberlain reached the Berghof.

After some desultory small-talk, Hitler retreated with the British
Prime Minister to his study. Ribbentrop, to his intense irritation,
was left out of the discussions. Only the interpreter Paul Schmidt
was present. For three hours Hitler and Chamberlain talked as the

peace of Europe hung in the balance. Hitler paraded the German
grievances, with occasional outbursts against Benes. Chamberlain
listened expressionless as the storm outside swelled to match the
menacing atmosphere inside the alpine retreat. He said he was
prepared to consider any solution to accommodate German
interests, as long as force was ruled out. Hitler heatedly retorted:
‘Who is speaking of force? Herr Bene§ is using force against my
countrymen in the Sudetenland. Herr Bene§, and not I, mobilized in
May. I won’t accept it any longer. I’ll settle this question myself in
the near future one way or another.’ ‘If I’ve understood you
correctly,’ Chamberlain angrily replied, ‘then you’re determined in
any event to proceed against Czechoslovakia. If that is your
intention, why have you had me coming to Berchtesgaden at all?
Under these circumstances it’s best if I leave straight away.
Apparently, it’s all pointless.’ It was an effective counter-thrust to
the bluster. Hitler, to Schmidt’s astonishment, retreated. ‘If you
recognize the principle of self-determination for the treatment of
the Sudeten question, then we can discuss how to put the principle
into practice,’ he stated. Chamberlain said he would have to consult
his cabinet colleagues. But when he declared his readiness thereafter
to meet Hitler again, the mood lifted. Chamberlain won Hitler’s
agreement to undertake no military action in the meantime. With
that, the meeting was over.

Immediately after the meeting, Hitler told Ribbentrop and
Weizsacker what had happened, rubbing his hands with pleasure at
the outcome. He claimed he had manoeuvred Chamberlain into a
corner. His ‘brutally announced intention, even at the risk of a
general European war, of solving the Czech question’ — he had not
spoken of the ‘Sudeten question’ — along with his concession that
Germany’s territorial claims in Europe would then be satisfied, had,
he asserted, forced Chamberlain to cede the Sudetenland. Hitler
had, he went on, been unable to reject the proposal of a plebiscite.
If the Czechs were to refuse one, ‘the way would be clear for the
German invasion’. If Czechoslovakia yielded on the Sudetenland, the
rest of the country would be taken over later, perhaps the following

spring. In any event, there would have to be a war, and during his
own lifetime.

Hitler was clearly satisfied with the way the talks had gone. He
spoke to his immediate circle at the Berghof the next day about the
discussions. As the night before, it appeared that he might now after
all be prepared to consider a diplomatic solution — at least for the
immediate future. Chamberlain’s visit had impressed him and, in a
way, unsettled him. Dealing at first hand with a democratic leader
who had to return to consult with the members of his government,
and was answerable to parliament, left a tinge of uncertainty. He
was, he said, still basically intending to march on Prague. But for
the first time there were signs of wavering. He was starting to look
for a possible retreat. Only very unwillingly, he hinted, if it proved
unavoidable in the light of the general European situation, would he
go along with the British proposal. Beyond that, things could be
settled with the Czechs without the British being involved.
Czechoslovakia was in any case, he added, difficult to rule, given its
ethnic mix and the claims of the other minorities — Poles,
Hungarians, and especially the Slovaks. There was, Hitler’s
immediate circle felt, now a glimmer of hope that war would be
avoided.

Chamberlain reported to the British cabinet his belief that he had
dissuaded Hitler from an immediate march into Czechoslovakia and
that the German dictator’s aims were ‘strictly limited’. If self-
determination for the Sudeten Germans were to be granted, he
thought, it would mark the end of German claims on
Czechoslovakia. The extent to which Chamberlain had allowed
himself to be deluded by the personality and assurances of
Germany’s dictator is apparent in the private evaluation he offered
one of his sisters, Ida, on returning to England: ‘In spite of the
harshness and ruthlessness I thought I saw in his face, I got the
impression that here was a man who could be relied upon when he
had given his word.’

The next days were spent applying pressure to the Czechs to
acquiesce in their own dismemberment. Preferably avoiding a

plebiscite, the joint approach to Prague of the British and French
was to compel the Czechs to make territorial concessions in return
for an international guarantee against unprovoked aggression. On
21 September, the Czechs yielded. Chamberlain’s second meeting
with Hitler had meanwhile been arranged for 22 September. Hitler,
too, was by now feeling the tension. He relaxed by watching
entertainment films. He did not want to see anything more serious.
His options remained open. As his comments following
Chamberlain’s visit had shown, he was now evidently moving away
from the all-out high-risk military destruction of Czechoslovakia in
a single blow, on which he had insisted, despite much internal
opposition, throughout the summer. Instead, there were pointers
that he was now moving in the direction of the territorial solution
not unlike the one which would eventually form the basis of the
Munich Agreement. He did not think he would get the Sudetenland
without a fight from the Czechs, though he imagined the western
powers would leave Bene§ to his fate. So he reckoned with limited
military confrontation to secure the Sudetenland as a first stage. The
destruction of the rest of Czechoslovakia would then follow,
perhaps immediately, but at any rate within a short time.

On 19 September he showed Goebbels the map that would
represent his demands to Chamberlain at their next meeting. The
idea was to force acceptance of as broad a demarcation line as
possible. The territory to be conceded was to be vacated by the
Czechs and occupied by German troops within eight days. Military
preparations, as Goebbels was now informed, would not be ready
before then. If there was any dispute, a plebiscite by Christmas
would be demanded. Should Chamberlain demand further
negotiations, the Fuhrer would feel no longer bound by any
agreements and would have freedom of action. ‘The Fuhrer will
show Chamberlain his map, and then —- end, basta! Only in that way
can this problem be solved,’ commented Goebbels.

On the afternoon of 22 September, Hitler and Chamberlain met
again, this time in the plush Hotel Dreesen in Bad Godesberg, with
its fine outlook on the Rhine. Chamberlain had flown from England
that morning, and was accommodated on the opposite bank of the
river at the Petersberg Hotel.

Their meeting began with a shock for Chamberlain. He initially
reported how the demands raised at Berchtesgaden had been met.
He mentioned the proposed British-French guarantee of the new
borders of Czechoslovakia, and the desired German non-aggression
pact with the Czechs. He sat back in his chair, a self-satisfied look
on his face. He was astounded when Hitler retorted: ‘I’m sorry, Herr
Chamberlain, that I can no longer go into these things. After the
development of the last days, this solution no longer applies.’
Chamberlain sat bolt upright, angry and astonished. Hitler claimed
he could not sign a non-aggression pact with Czechoslovakia until
the demands of Poland and Hungary were met. He had some
criticisms of the proposed treaties. Above all, the envisaged time-
scale was too long. Working himself up into a frenzy about Benes
and the alleged terroristic repression of the Sudeten Germans, he
demanded the occupation of the Sudeten territory immediately.
Chamberlain pointed out that this was a completely new demand,
going far beyond the terms outlined at Berchtesgaden. He returned,
depressed and angry, to his hotel on the other bank of the Rhine.

Chamberlain did not appear for the prearranged meeting the next
morning. Instead, he sent a letter to Hitler stating that it was
impossible for him to approve a plan which would be seen by public
opinion in Britain, France, and the rest of the world as deviating
from the previously agreed principles. Nor had he any doubts, he
wrote, that the Czechs would mobilize their armed forces to resist
any entry of German troops into the Sudetenland. Hitler and
Ribbentrop hastily deliberated. Then Hitler dictated a lengthy reply
— amounting to little more than his verbal statements the previous
day and insisting on the immediate transfer of the Sudeten territory
to end ‘Czech tyranny’ and uphold ‘the dignity of a great power’.
The interpreter Schmidt was designated to translate the four- to

five-page letter, and take it by hand to Chamberlain. The British
Prime Minister received it calmly. His own response was given to
Ribbentrop within two hours or so. He offered to take the new
demands to the Czechs, said he would have to return to England to
prepare for this, and requested a memorandum from the German
government which, it was agreed, would be delivered later that
evening by Hitler.

It was almost eleven o’clock when Chamberlain returned to the
Hotel Dreesen. The drama of the late-night meeting was enhanced
by the presence of advisers on both sides, fully aware of the peace
of Europe hanging by a thread, as Schmidt began to translate
Hitler’s memorandum. It demanded the complete withdrawal of the
Czech army from the territory drawn on a map, to be ceded to
Germany by 28 September. Hitler had spoken to Goebbels on 21
September of demands for eight days for Czech withdrawal and
German occupation. He was now, late on the evening of 23
September, demanding the beginning of withdrawal in little over
two days and completion in four. Chamberlain raised his hands in
despair. ‘That’s an ultimatum,’ he protested. ‘With great
disappointment and deep regret I must register, Herr Reich
Chancellor,’ he remarked, ‘that you have not supported in the
slightest my efforts to maintain peace.’

At this tense point, news arrived that Bene§ had announced the
general mobilization of the Czech armed forces. For some moments
no one spoke. War now seemed inevitable. Then Hitler, in little
more than a whisper, told Chamberlain that despite this provocation
he would hold to his word and undertake nothing against
Czechoslovakia — at least as long as the British Prime Minister
remained on German soil. As a special concession, he would agree
to 1 October as the date for Czech withdrawal from the Sudeten
territory. It was the date he had set weeks earlier as the moment for
the attack on Czechoslovakia. He altered the date by hand in the
memorandum, adding that the borders would look very different if
he were to proceed with force against Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain
agreed to take the revised memorandum to the Czechs. After the

drama, the meeting ended in relative harmony. Chamberlain flew
back, disappointed but not despairing, next morning to London to
report to his cabinet.

While Chamberlain was meeting his cabinet, on Sunday, 25
September, Hitler was strolling through the gardens of the Reich
Chancellery on a warm, early autumn afternoon, with Goebbels,
talking at length about his next moves. ‘He doesn’t believe that
Benesch [Bene§] will yield,’ noted the Propaganda Minister the
following day in his diary. ‘But then a terrible judgement will strike
him. On 27-28 September our military build-up will be ready. The
Fuhrer then has 5 days’ room for manoeuvre. He already established
these dates on 28 May. And things have turned out just as he
predicted. The Fuhrer is a divinatory genius. But first comes our
mobilization. This will proceed so lightning-fast that the world will
experience a miracle. In 8-10 days all that will be ready. If we
attack the Czechs from our borders, the Fiihrer reckons it will take
2-3 weeks. But if we attack them after our entry, he thinks it will
be finished in 8 days. The radical solution is the best. Otherwise,
we'll never be rid of the thing.’ This somewhat garbled account
appears to indicate that Hitler was at this juncture contemplating a
two-stage invasion of Czechoslovakia: first the Sudeten area, then at
a later, and unspecified, point, the rest of the country. This matches
the notion reported by Weizsacker after the first meeting with
Chamberlain. Hitler was not bluffing, therefore, in his plans to take
the Sudetenland by force on 1 October if it was not conceded
beforehand. But he had retreated from the intention, which had
existed since the spring, of the destruction of the whole of
Czechoslovakia by a single military operation at the beginning of
October.

The mood in London was, meanwhile, changing. Following his
experience in Godesberg, Chamberlain was moving towards a
harder line, and the British cabinet with him. After talks with the
French, it was decided that the Czechs would not be pressed into
accepting the new terms. Sir Horace Wilson, Chamberlain’s closest
adviser, was to go as the Prime Minister’s envoy to Berlin to

recommend a supervised territorial transfer and at the same time
warn Hitler that in the event of German military action against
Czechoslovakia France would honour its alliance commitments and
Britain would support France.

On the late afternoon of 26 September, Wilson, accompanied by
Sir Nevile Henderson and Ivone Kirkpatrick, first secretary in the
British Embassy, were received by Hitler in his study in the Reich
Chancellery. That evening Hitler was to deliver a ferocious attack
on Czechoslovakia in the Sportpalast. Wilson had not chosen a good
moment to expect rational deliberation of the letter from
Chamberlain that he presented to the German dictator. Hitler
listened, plainly agitated, to the translation of the letter, informing
him that the Czechs had rejected the terms he had laid down at
Godesberg. Part-way through he exploded with anger, jumping to
his feet, shouting: ‘There’s no point at all in somehow negotiating
any further.’ He made for the door, as if ending the meeting
forthwith with his visitors left in his own study. But he pulled
himself together and returned to his seat while the rest of the letter
was translated. As soon as it was over, there was another frenzied
outburst. The interpreter, Paul Schmidt, later commented that he
had never before seen Hitler so incandescent. Wilson’s attempts to
discuss the issues rationally and his cool warning of the implications
of German military action merely provoked him further. ‘If France
and England want to strike,’ he ranted, ‘let them go ahead. I don’t
give a damn.’ He gave the Czechs till 2 p.m. on Wednesday, 28
September, to accept the terms of the Godesberg Memorandum and
German occupation of the Sudetenland by 1 October. Otherwise
Germany would take it by force. He recommended a visit to the
Sportpalast that evening to Wilson, so that he would sense the mood
in Germany for himself.

The ears of the world were on Hitler’s speech to the tense
audience of around 20,000 or so packed into the cavernous
Sportpalast. The large number of diplomats and journalists present
were glued to every word. The American journalist William Shirer,
sitting in the balcony directly above the German Chancellor,

thought Hitler ‘in the worst state of excitement I’ve ever seen him
in’. His speech — ‘a psychological masterpiece’ in Goebbels’s
judgement — was perfectly tuned to the whipped-up anti-Czech
mood of the party faithful. He was soon into full swing, launching
into endless tirades against Benes and the Czechoslovakian state. He
had assured the British Prime Minister, he stated, that he had no
further territorial demands in Europe once the Sudeten problem was
solved. The decision for war or peace rested with Benes: ‘He will
either accept this offer and finally give freedom to the Germans, or
we will take this freedom ourselves!’ he threatened. ‘We are
determined. Herr Bene§ may now choose,’ he concluded.

The masses in the hall, who had interrupted almost every
sentence with their fanatical applause, shouted, cheered, and
chanted for minutes when he had ended: ‘Fiihrer command, we will
follow!’ Hitler had worked himself into an almost orgasmic frenzy
by the end of his speech. When Goebbels, closing the meeting,
pledged the loyalty of all the German people to him and declared
that ‘a November 1918 will never be repeated’, Hitler, according to
Shirer, ‘looked up to him, a wild, eager expression in his eyes ...
leaped to his feet and with a fanatical fire in his eyes ... brought his
right hand, after a grand sweep, pounding down on the table and
yelled ... “Ja”. Then he slumped into his chair exhausted.’

Hitler was in no mood for compromise when Sir Horace Wilson
returned next morning to the Reich Chancellery with another letter
from Chamberlain guaranteeing, should Germany refrain from
force, the implementation of the Czech withdrawal from the
Sudeten territory. When Wilson asked whether he should take any
message back to London, Hitler replied that the Czechs had the
option only of accepting or rejecting the German memorandum. In
the event of rejection, he shouted, repeating himself two or three
times, ‘I will smash the Czechs.’ Wilson, a tall figure, then drew
himself to his full height and slowly but emphatically delivered a
further message from Chamberlain: ‘If, in pursuit of her Treaty
obligations, France became actively engaged in hostilities against
Germany, the United Kingdom would feel obliged to support her.’

Enraged, Hitler barked back: ‘If France and England strike, let them
do so. It’s a matter of complete indifference to me. I amprepared for
every eventuality. I can only take note of the position. It is Tuesday
today, and by next Monday we shall all be at war.’ The meeting
ended at that point. As Schmidt recalled, it was impossible to talk
rationally with Hitler that morning.

Still, Wilson’s warnings were not lost on Hitler. In calmer mood,
he had Weizsacker draft him a letter to Chamberlain, asking him to
persuade the Czechs to see reason and assuring him that he had no
further interest in Czechoslovakia once the Sudeten Germans had
been incorporated into the Reich.

Late that afternoon a motorized division began its ominous
parade through Wilhelmstraf{e past the government buildings. For
three hours, Hitler stood at his window as it rumbled past.
According to the recollections of his Luftwaffe adjutant Nicolaus von
Below, he had ordered the display not to test the martial spirit of
the Berlin people, but to impress foreign diplomats and journalists
with German military might and readiness for war. If that was the
aim, the attempt misfired. The American journalist William Shirer
reported on the sullen response of the Berliners — ducking into
doorways, refusing to look on, ignoring the military display — as
‘the most striking demonstration against war I’ve ever seen’. Hitler
was reportedly disappointed and angry at the lack of enthusiasm
shown by Berliners. The contrast with the reactions of the hand-
picked audience in the Sportpalast was vivid. It was a glimpse of the
mood throughout the country. Whatever the feelings about the
Sudeten Germans, only a small fanaticized minority thought them
worth a war against the western powers.

But if Hitler was disappointed that the mood of the people did
not resemble that of August 1914, his determination to press ahead
with military action on 1 October, if the Czechs did not yield, was
unshaken, as he made clear that evening to Ribbentrop and
Weizsacker. Ribbentrop was by now, however, practically the only
hawkish influence on Hitler. From all other sides, pressures were
mounting for him to pull back from the brink.

For Hitler, to retreat from an ‘unalterable decision’ was
tantamount to a loss of face. Even so, for those used to dealing at
close quarters with him, the unthinkable happened. The following
morning of 28 September, hours before the expiry of the ultimatum
to Czechoslovakia, he changed his mind and conceded to the
demands for a negotiated settlement. ‘One can’t grasp this change.
Fuhrer has given in, and fundamentally,’ noted Helmuth Groscurth.

The decisive intervention was Mussolini’s. Feelers for such a
move had been put out by an increasingly anxious Goring a
fortnight or so earlier. Goring had also tried, through Henderson, to
interest the British in the notion of a conference of the major
powers to settle the Sudeten question by negotiation. Before
Mussolini’s critical move, the British and French had also applied
maximum pressure. Chamberlain had replied to Hitler’s letter,
emphasizing his incredulity that the German Chancellor was
prepared to risk a world war perhaps bringing the end of
civilization ‘for the sake of a few days’ delay in settling this long-
standing problem’. His letter contained proposals, agreed with the
French, to press the Czechs into immediate cession of the Sudeten
territory, the transfer to be guaranteed by Britain and to begin on 1
October. An International Boundary Commission would work out
the details of the territorial settlement. The British Prime Minister
indicated that he was prepared to come to Berlin immediately,
together with the representatives of France and Italy, to discuss the
whole issue. Chamberlain also wrote to Mussolini, urging
agreement with his proposal ‘which will keep all our peoples out of

War.

The French, too, had been active. The ambassador in Berlin,
André Francois-Poncet, had been instructed at 4 a.m. to put
proposals similar to Chamberlain’s before Hitler. His request early
next morning for an audience with Hitler was not welcomed by
Ribbentrop, still spoiling for war. But after intercession by Goring,
prompted by Henderson, Hitler agreed to see the French
Ambassador at 11.15 a.m.

Francois-Poncet, when eventually his audience was granted,
warned Hitler that he would not be able to localize a military
conflict with Czechoslovakia, but would set Europe in flames. Since
he could attain almost all his demands without war, the risk seemed
senseless. At that point, around 11.40 a.m., the discussion was
interrupted by a message that the Italian ambassador Bernardo
Attolico wished to see Hitler immediately on a matter of great
urgency. Hitler left the room with his interpreter, Schmidt. The tall,
stooping, red-faced ambassador lost no time in coming to the point.
He breathlessly announced to Hitler that the British government had
let Mussolini know that it would welcome his mediation in the
Sudeten question. The areas of disagreement were small. The Duce
supported Germany, the ambassador went on, but was ‘of the
opinion that the acceptance of the English proposal would be
advantageous’ and appealed for a postponement of the planned
mobilization. After a moment’s pause, Hitler replied: ‘Tell the Duce
I accept his proposal.’ It was shortly before noon. Hitler now had
his way of climbing down without losing face. ‘We have no
jumping-off point for war,’ commented Goebbels. ‘You can’t carry
out a world war on account of modalities.’

When the British Ambassador Henderson entered at 12.15 p.m.
with Chamberlain’s letter, Hitler told him that at the request of his
‘great friend and ally, Signor Mussolini’, he had postponed
mobilization for twenty-four hours. The climax of war-fever had
passed. During Henderson’s hour-long audience, Attolico interrupted
once more to tell Hitler that Mussolini had agreed to the British
proposals for a meeting of the four major powers. When the
dramatic news reached Chamberlain, towards the end of a speech
about the crisis he was making to a packed and tense House of
Commons, which was expecting an announcement meaning war, the
house erupted. ‘We stood on our benches, waved our order papers,
shouted until we were hoarse — a scene of indescribable
enthusiasm,’ recorded one Member of Parliament. ‘Peace must now
be saved.’

War was averted — at least for the present. “The heavens are
beginning to lighten somewhat,’ wrote Goebbels. ‘We probably still
have the possibility of taking the Sudeten German territory
peacefully. The major solution still remains open, and we will
further rearm for future eventualities.’

Already early the next afternoon, Hitler, Mussolini, Chamberlain,
and Edouard Daladier, the small, quiet, dapper premier of France,
together with Ribbentrop, Weizsacker, Ciano, Wilson, and Alexis
Léger, State Secretary in the French Foreign Office, took their seats
around a table in the newly constructed Fuhrerbau amid the
complex of party buildings centred around the Brown House - the
large and imposing party headquarters — in Munich. There they
proceeded to carve up Czechoslovakia.

The four heads of government began by stating their relative
positions on the Sudeten issue. They all — Hitler, too — spoke against
a solution by force. The discussions focused upon the written
proposal to settle the Sudeten question, by now translated into all
four languages, that Mussolini had delivered the previous day
(though the text had actually been sketched out by Goring, then
formalized in the German Foreign Office under Weizsacker’s eye
with some input by Neurath but avoiding any involvement by
Ribbentrop, before being handed to the Italian ambassador). It
provided the basis for what would become known as the notorious
Munich Agreement. The circle of those involved in discussions had
now widened to include Goring and the Ambassadors of Italy,
France, and Great Britain (Attolico, Francois-Poncet, and
Henderson), as well as legal advisers, secretaries, and adjutants. But
it was now mainly a matter of legal technicalities and complex
points of detail. The main work was done. That evening, Hitler
invited the participants to a festive dinner. Chamberlain and
Daladier found their excuses. After the dirty work had been done,
they had little taste for celebration.

The deliberations had lasted in all for some thirteen hours. But,
sensational though the four-power summit meeting was for the
outside world, the real decision had already been taken around

midday on 28 September, when Hitler had agreed to Mussolini’s
proposal for a negotiated settlement. Eventually, around 2.30 a.m.
on the morning of 30 September, the draft agreement was signed.
These terms were in effect those of the Godesberg Memorandum,
modified by the final Anglo-French proposals, and with dates
entered for a progressive German occupation, to be completed
within ten days. ‘We have then essentially achieved everything that
we wanted according to the small plan,’ commented Goebbels. ‘The
big plan is for the moment, given the prevailing circumstances, not
yet realizable.’

Hitler looked pale, tired, and out of sorts when Chamberlain
visited him in his apartment in Prinzregentenplatz to present him
with a joint declaration of Germany’s and Britain’s determination
never to go to war with one another again. Chamberlain had
suggested the private meeting during a lull in proceedings the
previous day. Hitler had, the British Prime Minister remarked,
‘jumped at the idea’. Chamberlain regarded the meeting as ‘a very
friendly and pleasant talk’. ‘At the end,’ he went on, ‘I pulled out
the declaration which I had prepared beforehand and asked if he
would sign it.’ After a moment’s hesitation, Hitler — with some
reluctance it seemed to the interpreter Paul Schmidt — appended his
signature. For him, the document was meaningless. And for him
Munich was no great cause for celebration. He felt cheated of the
greater triumph which he was certain would have come from the
limited war with the Czechs — his aim all summer. But when the
next crisis duly came, he was even more confident that he knew his
adversaries: ‘Our enemies are small worms,’ he would tell his
generals in August 1939. ‘I saw them in Munich.’

Hitler was scornful, too, of his generals after Munich. Their
opposition to his plans had infuriated him all summer. How he
would have reacted had he been aware that no less a person than
his new Chief of Staff, General Halder, had been involved in plans
for a coup d’état in the event of war over Czechoslovakia can be left
to the imagination. Whether the schemes of the ill-coordinated
groups involved in the nascent conspiracy would actually have come

to anything is an open question. But with the Munich Agreement,
the chance was irredeemably gone. Chamberlain returned home to a
hero’s welcome. But for German opponents of the Nazi regime, who
had hoped to used Hitler’s military adventurism as the weapon of
his own deposition and destruction, Chamberlain was anything but
the hero of the hour. ‘Chamberlain saved Hitler,’ was how they
bitterly regarded the appeasement diplomacy of the western
powers.

Hitler’s own popularity and prestige reached new heights after
Munich. He returned to another triumphant welcome in Berlin. But
he was well aware that the elemental tide of euphoria reflected the
relief that peace had been preserved. The ‘home-coming’ of the
Sudeten Germans was of only secondary importance. He was being
féted not as the ‘first soldier of the Reich’, but as the saviour of the
peace he had not wanted. At the critical hour, the German people,
in his eyes, had lacked enthusiasm for war. The spirit of 1914 had
been missing. Psychological rearmament had still to take place. A
few weeks later, addressing a select audience of several hundred
German journalists and editors, he gave a remarkably frank
indication of his feelings: ‘Circumstances have compelled me to
speak for decades almost solely of peace,’ he declared. ‘It is natural
that such a ... peace propaganda also has its dubious side. It can
only too easily lead to the view establishing itself in the minds of
many people that the present regime is identical with the
determination and will to preserve peace under all circumstances.
That would not only lead to a wrong assessment of the aims of this
system, but would also above all lead to the German nation, instead
of being forearmed in the face of events, being filled with a spirit
which, as defeatism, in the long run would take away and must take
away the successes of the present regime.’ It was necessary,
therefore, to transform the psychology of the German people, to
make them see that some things could only be attained through
force, and to represent foreign-policy issues in such a way that ‘the
inner voice of the people itself slowly begins to cry out for the use
of force’.

The speech is revealing. Popular backing for war had to be
manufactured, since war and expansion were irrevocably bound up
with the survival of the regime. Successes, unending triumphs, were
indispensable for the regime, and for Hitler’s own popularity and
prestige on which, ultimately, the regime depended. Only through
expansion — itself impossible without war — could Germany, and the
National Socialist regime, survive. This was Hitler’s thinking. The
gamble for expansion was inescapable. It was not a matter of
personal choice.

The legacy of Munich was fatally to weaken those who might
even now have constrained Hitler. Any potential limits — external
and internal — on his freedom of action instead disappeared. Hitler’s
drive to war was unabated. And next time he was determined he
would not be blocked by last-minute diplomatic manoeuvres of the
western powers, whose weakness he had seen with his own eyes at
Munich.

15
Marks of a Genocidal Mentality

The ideological dynamic of the Nazi regime was by no means solely
a matter of Hitler’s personalized Weltanschauung. In fact, Hitler’s
ideological aims had so far played only a subordinate role in his
expansionist policy, and would not figure prominently in the Polish
crisis during the summer of 1939. The party and its numerous sub-
organizations were, of course, important in sustaining the pressure
for ever-new discriminatory measures against ideological target-
groups. But little in the way of coherent planning could be expected
from the central party office, under the charge of Rudolf HefS,
Hitler’s deputy in party affairs. The key agency was not the party,
but the SS.

The interest in expansion was self-evident. Buoyed by their
successes in Austria and the Sudetenland, Himmler, Heydrich, and
the top echelons of the SS were keen to extend — naturally, under
Hitler’s aegis — their own empire. Already in August 1938, a decree
by Hitler met Himmler’s wish to develop an armed wing of the SS.
It provided in effect a fourth branch of the armed forces — far
smaller than the others, but envisaged as a body of ideologically
motivated ‘political soldiers’ standing at the Fihrer’s ‘exclusive
disposal’. It was little wonder that Himmler had been one of the
hawks during the Sudeten crisis, aligning himself with Ribbentrop,
and encouraging Hitler’s aggression. The leaders of the SS were now
looking to territorial gains to provide them with opportunities for
ideological experimentation on the way to the fulfilment of the
vision of a racially purified Greater German Reich under the heel of
the chosen caste of the SS élite. In a world after Hitler, with ‘final

victory’ achieved, the SS were determined to be the masters of
Germany and Europe.

They saw their mission as the ruthless eradication of Germany’s
ideological enemies, who, in Himmler’s strange vision, were
numerous and menacing. He told top SS leaders in early November
1938: ‘We must be clear that in the next ten years we will certainly
encounter unheard of critical conflicts. It is not only the struggle of
the nations, which in this case are put forward by the opposing side
merely as a front, but it is the ideological struggle of the entire
Jewry, freemasonry, Marxism, and churches of the world. These
forces — of which I presume the Jews to be the driving spirit, the
origin of all the negatives — are clear that if Germany and Italy are
not annihilated, they will be annihilated. That is a simple
conclusion. In Germany the Jew cannot hold out. This is a question
of years. We will drive them out more and more with an
unprecedented ruthlessness ...’

The speech was held a day before Germany exploded in an orgy
of elemental violence against its Jewish minority in the notorious
pogrom of 9-10 November 1938, cynically dubbed in popular
parlance, on account of the millions of fragments of broken glass
littering the pavements of Berlin outside wrecked Jewish shops,
‘Reich Crystal Night’ (Reichskristallnacht). This night of horror, a
retreat in a modern state to the savagery associated with bygone
ages, laid bare to the world the barbarism of the Nazi regime.
Within Germany, it brought immediate draconian measures to
exclude Jews from the economy, accompanied by a restructuring of
anti-Jewish policy, placing it now directly under the control of the
SS, whose leaders linked war, expansion, and eradication of Jewry.

Such a linkage was not only reinforced in the eyes of the SS in the
aftermath of ‘Crystal Night’. For Hitler, too, the connection between
the war he knew was coming and the destruction of Europe’s Jews
was now beginning to take concrete shape. Since the 1920s he had
not deviated from the view that German salvation could only come
through a titanic struggle for supremacy in Europe, and for eventual
world power, against mighty enemies backed by the mightiest

enemy of all, perhaps more powerful even than the Third Reich
itself: international Jewry. It was a colossal gamble. But for Hitler it
was a gamble that could not be avoided. And for him, the fate of
the Jews was inextricably bound up with that gamble.

The nationwide pogrom carried out by rampaging Nazi mobs on
the night of 9-10 November was the culmination of a third wave of
antisemitic violence — worse even than those of 1933 and 1935 -—
that had begun in the spring of 1938 and run on as the domestic
accompaniment to the foreign-political crisis throughout the
summer and autumn. Part of the background to the summer of
violence was the open terror on the streets of Vienna in March, and
the ‘success’ that Eichmann had scored in forcing the emigration of
the Viennese Jews. Nazi leaders in cities of the ‘old Reich’,
particularly Berlin, took note. The chance to be rid of ‘their’ Jews
seemed to open up. A second strand in the background was the
‘aryanization’ drive to hound Jews out of German economic life. At
the beginning of 1933 there had been some 50,000 Jewish
businesses in Germany. By July 1938, there were only 9,000 left.
The big push to exclude the Jews came between spring and autumn
1938. The 1,690 businesses in Jewish hands in Munich in February
1938, for instance, had fallen to only 666 (two-thirds of them
owned by foreign citizens) by October. The ‘aryanization’ drive not
only closed businesses, or saw them bought out for a pittance by
new ‘aryan’ owners. It also brought a new flood of legislative
measures imposing a variety of discriminatory restrictions and
occupational bans — such as on Jewish doctors and lawyers — even to
the extent of preventing Jews from trying to eke out a living as
pedlars. It was a short step from legislation to pinpoint remaining
Jewish businesses to identifying Jewish persons. A decree of 17
August had made it compulsory for male Jews to add the forename
‘Israel’, females the forename ‘Sara’, to their existing names and, on
pain of imprisonment, to use those names in all official matters. On
5 October, they were compelled to have a ‘J’ stamped in their
passports. A few days later, Goring declared that ‘the Jewish

Question must now be tackled with all means available, for they
[the Jews] must get out of the economy’.

Alongside the legislation, inevitably, went the violence. Scores of
localized attacks on Jewish property and on individual Jews, usually
carried out by members of party formations, punctuated the
summer months. Far more than had been the case in the earlier
antisemitic waves, attention of party activists increasingly focused
on synagogues and Jewish cemeteries, which were repeatedly
vandalized. As an indicator of their mood, and an ‘ordered’ foretaste
of what would follow across the land during ‘Crystal Night’, the
main synagogue in Munich was demolished on 9 June, the first in
Germany to be destroyed by the Nazis. During a visit to the city a
few days earlier, Hitler had taken objection to its proximity to the
Deutsches Ktinstlerhaus (‘House of German Artists’). The official
reason given was that the building was a hindrance to traffic.

Hitler saw it as important that he should not be publicly
associated with the anti-Jewish campaign as it gathered momentum
during 1938. No discussion by the press of the ‘Jewish Question’
was, for example, permitted in connection with his visits to
different parts of Germany in that year. Preserving his image, both
at home and - especially in the light of the developing Czech crisis —
abroad, through avoiding personal association with distasteful
actions towards the Jews appears to have been the motive. Hence,
he insisted in September 1938, at the height of the Sudeten crisis,
that his signing of the fifth implementation ordinance under the
Reich Citizenship Law, to oust Jewish lawyers, should not be
publicized at that stage in order to prevent any possible
deterioration of Germany’s image —- clearly meaning his own image
— at such a tense moment.

In fact, he had to do little or nothing to stir the escalating
campaign against the Jews. Others made the running, took the
initiative, pressed for action — always, of course, on the assumption
that this was in line with Nazism’s great mission. It was a classic
case of ‘working towards the Fuhrer’ — taking for granted (usually
on grounds of self-interest) that he approved of measures aimed at

the ‘removal’ of the Jews, measures seen as plainly furthering his
long-term goals. Party activists in the Movement’s various
formations needed no encouragement to unleash further attacks on
Jews and their property. ‘Aryans’ in business, from the smallest to
the largest, looked to every opportunity to profit at the expense of
their Jewish counterparts. Hundreds of Jewish businesses —
including long-established private banks such as Warburg and
Bleichroder — were now forced, often through gangster-like
extortion, to sell out for a fraction of their value to ‘aryan’ buyers.
Big business gained most. Giant concerns like Mannesmann, Krupp,
Thyssen, Flick, and IG-Farben, and leading banks such as the
Deutsche Bank and the Dresdner Bank, were the major beneficiaries,
while a variety of business consortia, corrupt party functionaries,
and untold numbers of small commercial enterprises grabbed what
they could. ‘Aryan’ pillars of the establishment like doctors and
lawyers were equally welcoming of the economic advantages that
could come their way with the expulsion of Jews from the medical
and legal professions. University professors turned their skills,
without prompting, to defining alleged negative characteristics of
the Jewish character and pyschology. And all the time, civil
servants worked like beavers to hone the legislation that turned
Jews into outcasts and pariahs, their lives into torment and misery.
The police, particularly the Gestapo — helped as always by eager
citizens anxious to denounce Jews or those seen as ‘friends of Jews’
— served as a proactive enforcement agency, deploying their
‘rational’ methods of arrest and internment in concentration camps
rather than the crude violence of the party hotheads, though with
the same objective. Not least, the SD — beginning life as the party’s
own intelligence organization, but developing into the crucial
surveillance and ideological planning agency within the rapidly
expanding SS — was advancing on its way to adopting the pivotal
role in the shaping of anti-Jewish policy.

Each group, agency, or individual involved in pushing forward
the radicalization of anti-Jewish discrimination had vested interests
and a specific agenda. Uniting them all and giving justification to

them was the vision of racial purification and, in particular, of a
‘Jew-free’ Germany embodied in the person of the Fuhrer. Hitler’s
role was, therefore, crucial, even if at times indirect. His broad
sanction was needed. But for the most part little more was required.

There is no doubt that Hitler fully approved of and backed the
new drive against the Jews, even if he took care to remain out of
the limelight. One of the main agitators for radical action against
the Jews, Joseph Goebbels, had no difficulty in April 1938 — in the
immediate wake of the savage persecution of the Jews in Vienna —
in persuading Hitler to support his plans to ‘clean up’ Berlin, the
seat of his own Gau. Hitler’s only stipulation was that nothing
should be undertaken before his meetings with Mussolini in early
May. A successful outcome of his talks with the Duce was of great
importance to him, particularly in the context of his unfolding plans
regarding Czechoslovakia. Possible diplomatic repercussions
provoked by intensified persecution of Jews in Germany’s capital
were to be avoided. Goebbels had already discussed his own aims
on the ‘Jewish Question’ with Berlin’s Police Chief Wolf Heinrich
Graf von Helldorf before he broached the matter with Hitler. “Then
we put it to the Fihrer. He agrees, but only after his trip to Italy.
Jewish establishments will be combed out. Jews will then get a
swimming-pool, a few cinemas, and restaurants allocated to them.
Otherwise entry forbidden. We’ll remove the character of a Jew-
paradise from Berlin. Jewish businesses will be marked as such. At
any rate, we’re now proceeding more radically. The Fuhrer wants
gradually to push them all out. Negotiate with Poland and Romania.
Madagascar would be the most suitable for them.’

The ‘Madagascar solution’ had been touted among radical
antisemites for decades. Reference to it at this juncture seems to
signify that Hitler was moving away from any assumption that
emigration would remove the ‘Jewish problem’ in favour of a
solution based upon territorial resettlement. He was conceivably
influenced in this by Heydrich, reporting the views of the ‘experts’
on Jewish policy in the SD. The relative lack of success in
‘persuading’ Jews to emigrate — little short of three-quarters of the

Jewish population recorded in 1933 still lived in Germany, despite
the persecution, as late as October 1938 — together with the
mounting obstacles to Jewish immigration created by other
countries had compelled the SD to revise its views on future anti-
Jewish policy. By the end of 1937 the idea of favouring a Jewish
state in Palestine, which Eichmann had developed, partly through
secret dealings with Zionist contacts, had cooled markedly.
Eichmann’s own visit to Palestine, arranged with his Zionist go-
between, had been an unmitigated failure. And, more importantly,
the German Foreign Office was resolutely hostile to the notion of a
Jewish state in Palestine. However, emigration remained the
objective.

Hitler, too, favoured Palestine as a targeted territory. In early
1938, he reaffirmed the policy, arrived at almost a year earlier,
aimed at promoting with all means available the emigration of Jews
to any country willing to take them, though looking to Palestine in
the first instance. But he was alert to the perceived dangers of
creating a Jewish state to threaten Germany at some future date. In
any case, other notions were being mooted. Already in 1937 there
had been suggestions in the SD of deporting Jews to barren,
unwelcoming parts of the world, scarcely capable of sustaining
human life and certainly, in the SD’s view, incompatible with a
renewed flourishing of Jewry and revitalized potential of ‘world
conspiracy’. In addition to Palestine, Ecuador, Colombia, and
Venezuela had been mentioned as possibilities. Nothing came of
such ideas at the time. But the suggestions were little different in
essence from the old notion, later to be revamped, of Madagascar as
an inhospitable territory fit to accommodate Jews until, it was
implied, they eventually died out. The notion of Jewish
resettlement, already aired in the SD, was itself latently genocidal.

Whatever line of policy was favoured, the ‘final goal’ (as Hitler’s
comments to Goebbels indicated) remained indistinct, and as such
compatible with all attempts to further the ‘removal’ of the Jews.
This eventual ‘removal’ was conceived as taking a good number of
years to complete. Even following ‘Crystal Night’, Heydrich was

still envisaging an ‘emigration action’ lasting from eight to ten
years. Hitler himself had already inferred to Goebbels towards the
end of July 1938 that ‘the Jews must be removed from Germany in
ten years’. In the meantime, he added, they were to be retained as
‘surety’.

Goebbels, meanwhile, was impatient to make headway with the
‘racial cleansing’ of Berlin. ‘A start has to be made somewhere,’ he
remarked. He thought the removal of Jews from the economy and
cultural life of the city could be accomplished within a few months.
The programme devised by mid-May for him by Helldorf, and given
his approval, put forward a variety of discriminatory measures —
including special identity cards for Jews, branding of Jewish shops,
bans on Jews using public parks, and special train compartments for
Jews — most of which, following the November Pogrom, came to be
generally implemented. Helldorf also envisaged the construction of
a ghetto in Berlin to be financed by the richer Jews.

Even if this last aim remained unfulfilled, the poisonous
atmosphere stirred by Goebbels’s agitation — with Hitler’s tacit
approval — had rapid results. Already on 27 May, a 1,000-strong
mob roamed parts of Berlin, smashing windows of shops belonging
to Jews, and prompting the police, anxious not to lose the initiative
in anti-Jewish policy, to take the owners into ‘protective custody’.
When in mid-June Jewish stores on the Kurftirstendamm, the prime
shopping street in the west of the city, were smeared with
antisemitic slogans by party activists, and plundering of some shops
took place, concern for Germany’s image abroad dictated a halt to
the public violence. Hitler intervened directly from Berchtesgaden,
following which Goebbels ruefully banned all illegal actions.
However, Berlin had set the tone. Similar ‘actions’, initiated by the
local party organizations, were carried out in Frankfurt,
Magdeburg, and other towns and cities. The lack of any explicit
general ban from above on ‘individual actions’, as had been imposed
in 1935, was taken by party activists in countless localities as a
green light to step up their own campaigns. The touchpaper had
been lit to the summer and autumn of violence. As the tension in

the Czech crisis mounted, local antisemitic initiatives in various
regions saw to it that the ‘Jewish Question’ became a powder-keg,
waiting for the spark. The radical tide surged forward. The
atmosphere had become menacing in the extreme for the Jews.

Even so, from the perspective of the regime’s leadership, how to
get the Jews out of the economy and force them to leave Germany
still appeared to be questions without obvious answers. As early as
January 1937, Eichmann had suggested, in a lengthy internal
memorandum, that pogroms were the most effective way of
accelerating the sluggish emigration. Like an answer to a prayer,
the shooting of the German Third Legation Secretary Ernst vom
Rath in Paris by a seventeen-year-old Polish Jew, Herschel
Grynszpan, on the morning of 7 November 1938 opened up an
opportunity not to be missed. It was an opportunity eagerly seized
upon by Goebbels. He had no difficulty in winning Hitler’s full
backing.

Grynszpan had meant to kill the Ambassador. Vom Rath just
happened to be the first official he saw. The shooting was an act of
despair and revenge for his own miserable existence and for the
deportation of his family at the end of October from Hanover —
simply deposited, along with a further 18,000 Polish Jews, over the
borders with Poland. Two and a half years earlier, when the Jewish
medical student David Frankfurter had killed the Nazi leader in
Switzerland Wilhelm Gustloff, in Davos, circumstances had
demanded that the lid be kept firmly on any wild response by party
fanatics in Germany. In the threatening climate of autumn 1938, the
situation could scarcely have been more different. Now, the Nazi
hordes were to be positively encouraged to turn their wrath on the
Jews. The death of vom Rath — he succumbed to his wounds on the
afternoon of 9 November — happened, moreover, to coincide with
the fifteenth anniversary of Hitler’s attempted putsch of 1923. All
over Germany, party members were meeting to celebrate one of the

legendary events of the ‘time of struggle’. The annual
commemoration marked a high point in the Nazi calendar. In
Munich, as usual, the party bigwigs were gathering.

On the morning following the fateful shooting, the Nazi press,
under Goebbels’s orchestration, had been awash with vicious attacks
on the Jews, guaranteed to incite violence. Sure enough, that
evening, 8 November, pogroms — involving the burning of
synagogues, destruction of Jewish property, plundering of goods,
and maltreatment of individual Jews — were instigated in a number
of parts of the country through the agitation of local party leaders
without any directives from on high. Usually, the local leaders
involved were radical antisemites in areas, such as Hessen, with
lengthy traditions of antisemitism. Goebbels noted the disturbances
with satisfaction in his diary: ‘In Hessen big antisemitic
demonstrations. The synagogues are burnt down. If only the anger
of the people could now be let loose!’ The following day, he
referred to the ‘demonstrations’, burning of synagogues, and
demolition of shops in Kassel and Dessau. During the afternoon,
news of vom Rath’s death came through. ‘Now that’s done it,’
remarked Goebbels.

The party’s ‘old guard’ were meeting that evening in the Old
Town Hall in Munich. Hitler, too, was present. On the way there,
with Goebbels, he had been told of disturbances against Jews in
Munich, but favoured the police taking a lenient line. He could
scarcely have avoided being well aware of the anti-Jewish actions in
Hessen and elsewhere, as well as the incitements of the press. It was
impossible to ignore the fact that, among party radicals, antisemitic
tension was running high. But Hitler had given no indication,
despite vom Rath’s perilous condition at the time and the menacing
antisemitic climate, of any intended action when he had spoken to
the ‘old guard’ of the party in his traditional speech at the
Burgerbraukeller the previous evening. By the time the party
leaders gathered for the reception on the 9th, Hitler was aware of
vom Rath’s death. With his own doctor, Karl Brandt, dispatched to
the bedside, Hitler had doubtless been kept well informed of the

Legation Secretary’s deteriorating condition and had heard of his
demise at the latest by seven o’clock that evening — in all
probability by telephone some hours earlier. According to his
Luftwaffe adjutant, Nicolaus von Below, he had already been given
the news - which he had received without overt reaction — that
afternoon while he was engaged in discussions on military matters
in his Munich apartment.

Goebbels and Hitler were seen to confer in agitated fashion
during the reception, though their conversation could not be
overheard. Hitler left shortly afterwards, earlier than usual and
without his customary exchanges with those present, to return to his
Munich apartment. Around 10 p.m. Goebbels delivered a brief but
highly inflammatory speech, reporting the death of vom Rath,
pointing out that there had already been ‘retaliatory’ action against
the Jews in Kurhessen and Magdeburg-Anhalt. He made it
abundantly plain without explicitly saying so that the party should
organize and carry out ‘demonstrations’ against the Jews
throughout the country, though make it appear that they were
expressions of spontaneous popular anger.

Goebbels’s diary entry leaves no doubt of the content of his
discussion with Hitler. ‘I go to the party reception in the Old Town
Hall. Huge amount going on. I explain the matter to the Fuhrer. He
decides: let the demonstrations continue. Pull back the police. The
Jews should for once get to feel the anger of the people. That’s
right. I immediately give corresponding directives to police and
party. Then I speak for a short time in that vein to the party
leadership. Storms of applause. All tear straight off to the telephone.
Now the people will act.’

Goebbels certainly did his best to make sure ‘the people’ acted.
He put out detailed instructions of what had and had not to be done.
He fired up the mood where there was hesitancy. Immediately after
he had spoken, the Stoftrupp Hitler, an ‘assault squad’ whose
traditions reached back to the heady days of pre-putsch beerhouse
brawls and bore the Fiihrer’s name, was launched to wreak havoc
on the streets of Munich. Almost immediately they demolished the

old synagogue in Herzog-Rudolf-Strafge, left standing after the main
synagogue had been destroyed in the summer. AdolfWagner,
Gauleiter of Munich and Upper Bavaria (who as Bavarian Minister
of Interior was supposedly responsible for order in the province),
himself no moderate in ‘the Jewish Question’, got cold feet. But
Goebbels pushed him into line. The ‘capital city of the Movement’
of all places was not going to be spared what was happening
already all over Germany. Goebbels then gave direct telephone
instructions to Berlin to demolish the synagogue in Fasanenstrafse,
off the Kurfiirstendamm.

The top leadership of the police and SS, also gathered in Munich
but not present when Goebbels had given his speech, learnt of the
‘action’ only once it had started. Heydrich, at the time in the Hotel
Vier Jahreszeiten, was informed by the Munich Gestapo Office
around 11.20 p.m., after the first orders had already gone out to the
party and SA. He immediately sought Himmler’s directives on how
the police should respond. The Reichsfihrer-SS was contacted in
Hitler’s Munich apartment. He asked what orders Hitler had for
him. Hitler replied — most likely at Himmler’s prompting — that he
wanted the SS to keep out of the ‘action’. Disorder and uncontrolled
violence and destruction were not the SS’s style. Himmler and
Heydrich preferred the ‘rational’, systematic approach to the
‘Jewish Question’. Soon after midnight orders went out that any SS
men participating in the ‘demonstrations’ were to do so only in
civilian clothing. At 1.20 a.m. Heydrich telexed all police chiefs
instructing the police not to obstruct the destruction of the
synagogues and to arrest as many male Jews, especially wealthy
ones, as available prison accommodation could take. The figure of
20-30,000 Jews had already been mentioned in a Gestapo directive
sent out before midnight.

Meanwhile, across the Reich, party activists — especially SA men —
were suddenly summoned by their local leaders and told to burn
down synagogues or were turned loose on other Jewish property.
Many of those involved had been celebrating at their own
commemoration of the Beerhall Putsch, and some were the worse

for wear from drink. The ‘action’ was usually improvised on the
spot.

At midnight, at the Feldherrnhalle in Munich where the
attempted putsch in 1923 had met its end, Goebbels had witnessed
the swearing-in of the SS to Hitler. The Propaganda Minister was
ready to return to his hotel when he saw the sky red from the fire
of the burning synagogue in Herzog-Rudolf-Strafge. Back he went to
Gau headquarters. Instructions were given out that the fire-brigade
should extinguish only what was necessary to protect nearby
buildings. Otherwise they were to let the synagogue burn down.
‘The StofStrupp is doing dreadful damage,’ he commented. Reports
came in to him of seventy-five synagogues on fire throughout the
Reich, fifteen of them in Berlin. He had evidently by this time heard
of the Gestapo directive. ‘The Fuhrer has ordered,’ he noted, ‘that
20-30,000 Jews are immediately to be arrested.’ In fact, it had been
a Gestapo order with no reference in it to a directive of the Fuhrer.
Clearly, however, though he had instigated the pogrom, Goebbels
took it that the key decisions came from Hitler. Goebbels went with
Julius Schaub, Hitler’s general factotum, into the Artists’ Club to
wait for further news. Schaub was in fine form. ‘His old Stofstrupp
past has been revived,’ commented Goebbels. He went back to his
hotel. He could hear the noise of shattering glass from smashed
shop windows. ‘Bravo, bravo,’ he wrote. After a few hours’ snatched
sleep, he added: ‘The dear Jews will think about it in future before
they shoot down German diplomats like that. And that was the
meaning of the exercise.’

All morning new reports of the destruction poured in. Goebbels
assessed the situation with Hitler. In the light of the mounting
criticism of the ‘action’, also — though naturally not for
humanitarian reasons — from within the top ranks of the Nazi
leadership, the decision was taken to halt it. Goebbels prepared a
decree to end the destruction, cynically commenting that if it were
allowed to continue there was the danger ‘that the mob would start
to appear’. He reported to Hitler, who was, Goebbels claimed, ‘in
agreement with everything. His opinions are very radical and

aggressive.’ ‘With minor alterations, the Fuhrer approves my edict
on the end of the actions ... The Fuhrer wants to move to very
severe measures against the Jews. They must get their businesses in
order themselves. Insurance will pay them nothing. Then the Fuhrer
wants gradually to expropriate the Jewish businesses.’

By that time, the night of horror for Germany’s Jews had brought
the demolition of around 100 synagogues, the burning of several
hundred others, the destruction of at least 8,000 Jews’ shops and
vandalizing of countless apartments. The pavements of the big cities
were strewn with shards of glass from the display windows of
Jewish-owned stores; merchandise, if not looted, had been hurled
on to the streets. Private apartments were wrecked, furniture
demolished, mirrors and pictures smashed, clothing shredded,
treasured possessions wantonly trashed. The material damage was
estimated soon afterwards by Heydrich at several hundred million
Marks.

The human misery of the victims was incalculable. Beatings and
bestial maltreatment, even of women, children, and the elderly,
were commonplace. A hundred or so Jews were murdered. It was
little wonder that suicide was commonplace that terrible night.
Many more succumbed to brutalities in the weeks following the
pogrom in the concentration camps of Dachau, Buchenwald, and
Sachsenhausen, where the 30,000 male Jews rounded up by the
police had been sent as a means of forcing their emigration.

The scale and nature of the savagery, and the apparent aim of
maximizing degradation and humiliation, reflected the success of
propaganda in demonizing the figure of the Jew — certainly within
the organizations of the party itself - and massively enhanced the
process, under way since Hitler’s takeover of power, of
dehumanizing Jews and excluding them from German society, a
vital step on the way to genocide.

The propaganda line of a spontaneous expression of anger by the
people was, however, believed by no one. ‘The public knows to the
last man,’ the party’s own court later admitted, ‘that political
actions like that of 9 November are organized and carried out by

the party, whether this is admitted or not. If all the synagogues
burn down in a single night, that has somehow to be organized, and
can only be organized by the party.’

Ordinary citizens, affected by the climate of hatred and
propaganda appealing to base instincts, motivated too by sheer
material envy and greed, nevertheless followed the party’s lead in
many places and joined in the destruction and looting of Jewish
property. Sometimes individuals regarded as the pillars of their
communities were involved. At the same time, there is no doubt
that many ordinary people were appalled at what met them when
they emerged on the morning of 10 November. A mixture of
motives operated. Some, certainly, felt human revulsion at the
behaviour of the Nazi hordes and sympathy for the Jews, even to
the extent of offering them material help and comfort. Not all
motives for the condemnation were as noble. Often, it was the
shame inflicted by ‘hooligans’ on Germany’s standing as a ‘nation of
culture’ which rankled. Most commonly of all, there was enormous
resentment at the unrestrained destruction of material goods at a
time when people were told that every little that was saved
contributed to the efforts of the Four-Year Plan.

Ill

By the morning of 10 November, anger was also rising among
leading Nazis responsible for the economy about the material
damage which had taken place. Walther Funk, who had replaced
Schacht as Economics Minister early in the year, complained
directly to Goebbels, but was told, to placate him, that Hitler would
soon give Goring an order to exclude the Jews from the economy.
Goring himself, who had been in a sleeping-compartment of a train
heading from Munich to Berlin as the night of violence had
unfolded, was furious when he found out what had happened. His
own credibility as economics supremo was at stake. He had
exhorted the people, so he told Hitler, to collect discarded

toothpaste tubes, rusty nails, and every bit of cast-out material. And
now, valuable property had been recklessly destroyed.

When they met at lunchtime on 10 November in his favourite
Munich restaurant, the Osteria Bavaria, Hitler made plain to
Goebbels his intention to introduce draconian economic measures
against the Jews. They were dictated by the perverted notion that
the Jews themselves would have to foot the bill for the destruction
of their own property by the Nazis. The victims, in other words,
were guilty of their own persecution. They would have to repair the
damage without any contributions from German insurance firms and
would be expropriated. Whether, as Goring later claimed, Goebbels
was the initiator of the suggestion to impose a fine of 1,000 million
Marks on the Jews is uncertain. More probably Goring, with his
direct interest as head of the Four-Year Plan in maximizing the
economic exploitation of the Jews, had himself come up with the
idea in telephone conversations with Hitler, and perhaps also with
Goebbels, that afternoon. Possibly, the idea was Hitler’s own,
though Goebbels does not refer to it when speaking of his wish for
‘very tough measures’ at their lunchtime meeting. At any rate, the
suggestion was bound to meet with Hitler’s favour. He had, after
all, in his ‘Memorandum on the Four-Year Plan’ in 1936, already
stated, in connection with accelerating the economic preparations
for war, his intention to make the Jews responsible for any damage
to the German economy. With the measures decided upon, Hitler
decreed ‘that now the economic solution should also be carried out’,
and ‘ordered by and large what had to happen’.

This was effectively achieved in the meeting, attended by over
100 persons, which Goring called for 12 November in the Air
Ministry. Goring began by stating that the meeting was of
fundamental importance. He had received a letter from Bormann,
on behalf of the Fuhrer, desiring a coordinated solution to the
‘Jewish Question’. The Fuhrer had informed him, in addition, by
telephone the previous day that the decisive steps were now to be
centrally synchronized. In essence, he went on, the problem was an
economic one. It was there that the issue had to be resolved. He

castigated the method of ‘demonstrations’, which damaged the
German economy. Then he concentrated on ways of confiscating
Jewish businesses and maximizing the possible gain to the Reich
from the Jewish misery. Goebbels raised the need for numerous
measures of social discrimination against the Jews, which he had
been pressing for in Berlin for months: exclusion from cinemas,
theatres, parks, beaches and bathing resorts, ‘German’ schools, and
railway compartments used by ‘aryans’. Heydrich suggested a
distinctive badge to be worn by Jews, which led on to discussion of
whether ghettos would be appropriate. In the event, the idea of
establishing ghettos was not taken up (though Jews would be forced
to leave ‘aryan’ tenement blocks and be banned from certain parts
of the cities, so compelling them in effect to congregate together);
and the suggestion of badges was rejected by Hitler himself soon
afterwards (presumably to avoid possible recurrence of the pogrom-
style violence which had provoked criticism even among the
regime’s leaders). They would not be introduced in the Reich itself
until September 1941.

But ‘Crystal Night’ had nevertheless spawned completely new
openings for radical measures. This was most evident in the
economic sphere, to which the meeting returned. Insurance
companies were told that they would have to cover the losses, if
their foreign business was not to suffer. But the payments would be
made to the Reich, not, of course, to the Jews. Towards the end of
the lengthy meeting, Goring announced, to the approval of the
assembled company, the ‘atonement fine’ that was to be imposed on
the Jews. Later that day, he issued decrees, imposing the billion-
Mark fine, excluding Jews from the economy by 1 January 1939,
and stipulating that Jews were responsible for paying for the
damage to their own property. ‘At any rate now a tabula rasa is
being made,’ commented Goebbels with satisfaction. ‘The radical
view has triumphed.’

Indeed, the November Pogrom had in the most barbaric way
imaginable cleared a pathway through the impasse into which Nazi
anti-Jewish policy had manoeuvred itself by 1938. Emigration had

been reduced to little more than a trickle, especially since the Evian
Conference, where, on the initiative of President Franklin D.
Roosevelt, delegates from thirty-two countries had assembled in the
French resort, deliberated from 6 to 14 July, then confirmed the
unwillingness of the international community to increase
immigration quotas for Jews. Moves to remove the Jews from the
economy were still proceeding far too slowly to satisfy party
fanatics. And anti-Jewish policy had suffered from complete lack of
coordination. Hitler himself had been little involved. Goebbels, a
driving-force in pressing for tougher measures against the Jews
since the spring, had recognized the opportunity that vom Rath’s
assassination gave him. He sniffed the climate, and knew conditions
were ripe. In a personal sense, too, the shooting of vom Rath was
timely. Goebbels’s marital difficulties and relationship with the
Czech film actress Lida Baarova had threatened to lower his
standing with Hitler. Now was a chance, by ‘working towards the
Fuhrer’ in such a key area, to win back favour.

One consequence of the night of violence was that the Jews were
now desperate to leave Germany. Some 80,000 fled, in the most
traumatic circumstances, between the end of 1938 and the
beginning of the war. By whatever desperate means, tens of
thousands of Jews were able to escape the clutches of the Nazis and
flee across neighbouring borders, to Britain, the USA, Latin America,
Palestine (despite British prohibitions), and to the distant refuge
with the most lenient policy of all: Japanese-occupied Shanghai.

The Nazis’ aim of forcing the Jews out had been massively
boosted. Beyond that, the problem of their slow-moving elimination
from the economy had been tackled. Whatever his criticism of
Goebbels, Goring had wasted no time in ensuring that the chance
was now taken fully to ‘aryanize’ the economy, and to profit from
‘Reichskristallnacht’. When he spoke, a week later, of the ‘very
critical state of the Reich finances’, he was able to add: ‘Aid first of
all through the billion imposed on the Jews and through the profits
to the Reich from the aryanization of Jewish concerns’. Others, too,
in the Nazi leadership seized the chance to push through a flood of

new discriminatory measures, intensifying the hopelessness of
Jewish existence in Germany. Radicalization fed on radicalization.

The radicalization encountered no opposition of any weight.
Ordinary people who expressed their anger, sorrow, distaste, or
shame at what had happened were powerless. Those who might
have articulated such feelings, such as the leaders of the Christian
Churches, among whose precepts was ‘love thy neighbour as
thyself’, kept quiet. Neither major denomination, Protestant or
Catholic, raised an official protest or even backing for those
courageous individual pastors and priests who did speak out. Within
the regime’s leadership, those, like Schacht, who had used economic
or otherwise tactical objections to try to combat what they saw as
counter-productive, wild ‘excesses’ of the radical antisemites in the
party, were now politically impotent. In any case, such economic
arguments lost all force with ‘Crystal Night’. The leaders of the
armed forces, scandalized though some of them were at the ‘cultural
disgrace’ of what had happened, made no public protest. Beyond
that, the deep antisemitism running through the armed forces meant
that no opposition worth mentioning to Nazi radicalism could be
expected from that quarter. Characteristic of the mentality was a
letter which the revered Colonel-General von Fritsch wrote, almost
a year after his dismissal and only a month after the November
Pogrom. Fritsch was reportedly outraged by ‘Crystal Night’. But, as
with so many, it was the method not the aim that appalled him. He
mentioned in his letter that after the previous war he had concluded
that Germany had to succeed in three battles in order to become
great again. Hitler had won the battle against the working class.
The other two battles, against Catholic Ultramontanism, and against
the Jews, still continued. ‘And the struggle against the Jews is the
hardest,’ he noted. ‘It is to be hoped that the difficulty of this
struggle is apparent everywhere.’

‘Crystal Night’ marked the final fling within Germany of ‘pogrom
antisemitism’. Willing though he was to make use of the method,
Hitler had emphasized as early as 1919 that it could provide no
solution to the ‘Jewish Question’. The massive material damage

caused, the public relations disaster reflected in the almost universal
condemnation in the international press, and to a lesser extent the
criticism levelled at the ‘excesses’ (though not at the draconian anti-
Jewish legislation that followed them) by broad sections of the
German population ensured that the ploy of open violence had had
its day. Its place was taken by something which turned out to be
even more sinister: the handing-over of practical responsibility for a
coordinated anti-Jewish policy to the ‘rational’ antisemites in the SS.
On 24 January 1939, Goring established — based on the model
which had functioned effectively in Vienna — a Central Office for
Jewish Emigration under the aegis of the Chief of the Security
Police, Reinhard Heydrich. The policy was still forced emigration,
now transformed into an all-out, accelerated drive to expel the Jews
from Germany. But the transfer of overall responsibility to the SS
nevertheless began a new phase of anti-Jewish policy. For the
victims, it marked a decisive step on the way that was to end in the
gas-chambers of the extermination camps.

The open brutality of the November Pogrom, the round-up and
incarceration of some 30,000 Jews that followed it, and the
draconian measures to force Jews out of the economy had,
Goebbels’s diary entries make plain, all been explicitly approved by
Hitler even if the initiatives had come from others, above all from
the Propaganda Minister himself.

To those who saw him late on the evening of 9 November, Hitler
had appeared to be shocked and angry at the reports reaching him
of what was happening. Himmler, highly critical of Goebbels, was
given the impression that Hitler was surprised by what he was
hearing when Himmler’s chief adjutant Karl Wolff informed them of
the burning of the Munich synagogue just before 11.30 that
evening. Nicolaus von Below, Hitler’s Luftwaffe adjutant, who saw
him immediately on his return to his apartment from the ‘Old Town
Hall’, was convinced that there was no dissembling in his apparent

anger and condemnation of the destruction. Speer was told by a
seemingly regretful and somewhat embarrassed Hitler that he had
not wanted the ‘excesses’. Speer thought Goebbels had probably
pushed him into it. Rosenberg, a few weeks after the events, was
convinced that Goebbels, whom he utterly detested, had ‘on the
basis of a general decree of the Fuhrer ordered the action as it were
in his name’. Military leaders, equally ready to pin the blame on
‘that swine Goebbels’, heard from Hitler that the ‘action’ had taken
place without his knowledge and that one of his Gauleiter had run
out of control.

Was Hitler genuinely taken aback by the scale of the ‘action’, for
which he had himself given the green light that very evening? The
agitated discussion with Goebbels in the Old Town Hall, like many
other instances of blanket verbal authorization given in the
unstructured and non-formalized style of reaching decisions in the
Third Reich, probably left precise intentions open to interpretation.
And certainly, in the course of the night, the welter of criticism
from Goring, Himmler, and other leading Nazis made it evident that
the ‘action’ had got out of hand, become counter-productive, and
had to be stopped — mainly on account of the material damage it
had caused.

But when he consented to Goebbels’s suggestion to ‘let the
demonstrations continue’, Hitler knew full well from the accounts
from Hessen what the ‘demonstrations’ amounted to. It took no
imagination at all to foresee what would happen if active
encouragement were given for a free-for-all against the Jews
throughout the Reich. If Hitler had not intended the
‘demonstrations’ he had approved to take such a course, what,
exactly, had he intended? Even on the way to the Old Town Hall, it
seems, he had rejected tough police action against anti-Jewish
vandals in Munich. The traditional Sto{$trupp Hitler, bearing his
own name, had been unleashed on Jewish property in Munich as
soon as Goebbels had finished speaking. One of his closest
underlings, Julius Schaub, had been in the thick of things with
Goebbels, behaving like the Stofstrupp fighter of old. During the

days that followed, Hitler took care to remain equivocal. He did not
praise Goebbels, or what had happened. But nor did he openly, even
to his close circle, let alone in public, condemn him outright or
categorically dissociate himself from the unpopular Propaganda
Minister. Goebbels had the feeling that his own policy against the
Jews met with Hitler’s full approval.

None of this has the ring of actions being taken against Hitler’s
will, or in opposition to his intentions. Rather, it seems to point, as
Speer presumed, to Hitler’s embarrassment when it became clear to
him that the action he had approved was meeting with little but
condemnation even in the highest circles of the regime. If Goebbels
himself could feign anger at the burning of synagogues whose
destruction he had himself directly incited, and even ordered, Hitler
was certainly capable of such cynicism. What anger Hitler
harboured was purely at an ‘action’ that threatened to engulf him in
the unpopularity he had failed to predict. Disbelieving that the
Fuhrer could have been responsible, his subordinate leaders were all
happy to be deceived. They preferred the easier target of Goebbels,
who had played the more visible role. From that night on, it was as
if Hitler wanted to draw a veil over the whole business. At his
speech in Munich to press representatives on the following evening,
10 November, he made not the slightest mention of the onslaught
against the Jews. Even in his ‘inner circle’, he never referred to
‘Reichskristallnacht’ during the rest of his days. But although he had
publicly distanced himself from what had taken place, Hitler had in
fact favoured the most extreme steps at every juncture.

The signs are that ‘Crystal Night’ had a profound impact upon
Hitler. For at least two decades, probably longer, he had harboured
feelings which fused fear and loathing into a pathological view of
Jews as the incarnation of evil threatening German survival.
Alongside the pragmatic reasons why Hitler agreed with Goebbels
that the time was opportune to unleash the fury of the Nazi
Movement against Jews ran the deeply embedded ideological urge
to destroy what he saw as Germany’s most implacable enemy,
responsible in his mind for the war and its most tragic and

damaging consequence for the Reich, the November Revolution.
This demonization of the Jew and fear of the ‘Jewish world
conspiracy’ was part of a world-view that saw the random and
despairing act of Herschel Grynszpan as part of a plot to destroy the
mighty German Reich. Hitler had by that time spent months at the
epicentre of an international crisis that had brought Europe to the
very brink of a new war. In the context of continuing crisis in
foreign policy, with the prospect of international conflict never far
away, ‘Crystal Night’ seems to have reinvoked -— certainly to have
re-emphasized — the presumed links, present in his warped outlook
since 1918-19 and fully expounded in Mein Kampf, between the
power of the Jews and war.

He had commented in the last chapter of Mein Kampf that ‘the
sacrifice of millions at the front’ would not have been necessary if
‘twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the
people had been held under poison gas’. Such rhetoric, appalling
though the sentiments were, was not an indication that Hitler
already had the ‘Final Solution’ in mind. But the implicit genocidal
link between war and the killing of Jews was there. Goring’s
remarks at the end of the meeting on 12 November had been an
ominous pointer in the same direction: ‘If the German Reich comes
into foreign-political conflict in the foreseeable future, it can be
taken for granted that we in Germany will think in the first instance
of bringing about a great showdown with the Jews.’

With war approaching again, the question of the threat of the
Jews in a future conflict was evidently present in Hitler’s mind. The
idea of using the Jews as hostages, part of Hitler’s mentality, but
also advanced in the SS’s organ Das Schwarze Korps in October and
November 1938, is testimony to the linkage between war and idea
of a ‘world conspiracy’. ‘The Jews living in Germany and Italy are
the hostages which fate has placed in our hand so that we can
defend ourselves effectively against the attacks of world Jewry,’
commented Das Schwarze Korps on 27 October 1938, under the
headline ‘Eye for an Eye, Tooth for a Tooth’. ‘Those Jews in
Germany are a part of world Jewry,’ the same newspaper

threatened on 3 November, still days before the nationwide pogrom
was unleashed. ‘They are also responsible for whatever world Jewry
undertakes against Germany, and — they are liable for the damages
which world Jewry inflicts and will inflict on us.’ The Jews were to
be treated as members of a warring power and interned to prevent
their engagement for the interests of world Jewry. Hitler had up to
this date never attempted to deploy the ‘hostage’ tactic as a weapon
of his foreign policy. Perhaps promptings from the SS leadership
now reawakened ‘hostage’ notions in his mind. Whether or not this
was the case, the potential deployment of German Jews as pawns to
blackmail the western powers into accepting further German
expansion was possibly the reason why, when stating that it was his
‘unshakeable will’ to solve ‘the Jewish problem’ in the near future,
and at a time when official policy was to press for emigration with
all means possible, he showed no interest in the plans advanced by
South African Defence and Economics Minister Oswald Pirow,
whom he met at the Berghof on 24 November, for international
cooperation in the emigration of German Jews. The same motive
was probably also behind the horrific threat he made to the
Czechoslovakian Foreign Minister FranziSek Chvalkovsky on 21
January 1939. ‘The Jews here will be annihilated,’ he declared. ‘The
Jews had not brought about 9 November 1918 for nothing. This day
will be avenged.’

Again, rhetoric should not be mistaken for a plan or programme.
Hitler was scarcely likely to have revealed plans to exterminate the
Jews which, when they did eventually emerge in 1941, were
accorded top secrecy, in a comment to a foreign diplomat.
Moreover, ‘annihilation’ (Vernichtung) was one of Hitler’s favourite
words. He tended to reach for it when trying to impress his threats
upon his audience, large or small. He would speak more than once
the following summer, for instance, of his intention to ‘annihilate’
the Poles. Horrific though their treatment was after 1939, no
genocidal programme followed.

But the language, even so, was not meaningless. The germ of a
possible genocidal outcome, however vaguely conceived, was

taking shape. Destruction and annihilation, not just emigration, of
the Jews was in the air. Already on 24 November Das Schwarze
Korps, portraying the Jews as sinking ever more to the status of
pauperized parasites and criminals, had concluded: ‘In the stage of
such a development we would therefore be faced with the hard
necessity of eradicating the Jewish underworld just as we are
accustomed in our ordered state to eradicate criminals: with fire and
sword! The result would be the actual and final end of Jewry in
Germany, its complete annihilation.’ This was not a preview of
Auschwitz and Treblinka. But without such a mentality, Auschwitz
and Treblinka would not have been possible.

In his speech to the Reichstag on 30 January 1939, the sixth
anniversary of his takeover of power, Hitler revealed publicly his
implicitly genocidal association of the destruction of the Jews with
the advent of another war. As always, he had an eye on the
propaganda impact. But his words were more than propaganda.
They gave an insight into the pathology of his mind, into the
genocidal intent that was beginning to take hold. He had no idea
how the war would bring about the destruction of the Jews. But,
somehow, he was certain that this would indeed be the outcome of
a new conflagration. ‘I have very often in my lifetime been a
prophet,’ he declared, ‘and was mostly derided. In the time of my
struggle for power it was in the first instance the Jewish people
who received only with laughter my prophecies that I would some
time take over the leadership of the state and of the entire people in
Germany and then, among other things, also bring the Jewish
problem to its solution. I believe that this once hollow laughter of
Jewry in Germany has meanwhile already stuck in the throat. I
want today to be a prophet again: if international finance Jewry
inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations
once more into a world war, the result will be not the
bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but
the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!’ It was a ‘prophecy’
that Hitler would return to on numerous occasions in the years 1941

and 1942, when the annihilation of the Jews was no longer terrible
rhetoric, but terrible reality.

16
Going for Broke

After Munich things started to move fast. With the dismembered
state of Czechoslovakia now friendless and, with its border
fortifications lost, exposed, and at Germany’s mercy, the completion
of the plans made in 1938 for its liquidation was only a matter of
time. As we saw, that had been Hitler’s view even before he
acceded to the Munich Agreement.

Beyond the rump of Czechoslovakia, German attention was
immediately turned on Poland. There was no plan at this stage for
invasion and conquest. The aim — soon proving illusory — was to
bind Poland to Germany against Russia (thereby also blocking any
possibility of an alliance with the French). At the same time, the
intention was to reach agreement over Danzig and the Corridor (the
land which Germany had been forced to cede to Poland in the
Versailles Treaty of 1919, giving the Poles access to the sea but
leaving East Prussia detached from the remainder of the Reich).
Already by late October, Ribbentrop was proposing to settle all
differences between Germany and Poland by an agreement for the
return of Danzig together with railway and road passage through
the Corridor — not in itself a novel idea — in return for a free port
for Poland in the Danzig area and an extension of the non-
aggression treaty to twenty-five years with a joint guarantee of
frontiers.

The proposal met with a predictably stony response from the
Polish government. The obduracy of the Poles, especially over
Danzig, rapidly brought the first signs of Hitler’s own impatience,
and an early indication of preparations to take Danzig by force.

Hitler was nevertheless at this point more interested in a negotiated
settlement with the Poles. Misleadingly informed by Ribbentrop of
Polish readiness in principle to move to a new settlement of the
Danzig question and the Corridor, he emphasized German-Polish
friendship during his speech to the Reichstag on 30 January 1939.
Some army leaders, a few days earlier, had been more belligerent.
In contrast to their overriding fears of western intervention during
the Sudeten crisis, a number of generals now argued that Britain
and France would remain inactive — a direct reflection of the
weakness of the western powers fully revealed at Munich — and that
negotiations with the Poles should be abandoned in favour of
military measures. A war against Poland, they claimed, would be
popular among the troops and among the German people.

Ribbentrop, aided by Goring, played — for strategic reasons — the
moderate on this occasion. For him, the main enemy was not
Poland, but Britain. He countered that, through a premature attack
in 1939 on Poland and Russia, Germany would become isolated,
would forfeit its armaments advantage, and would most likely be
forced by western strength to give up any territorial gains made.
Instead, Germany needed to act together with Italy and Japan,
retaining Polish neutrality until France had been dealt with and
Britain at least isolated and denied all power on the Continent, if
not militarily defeated. War by Germany and Italy to defeat France
and leave Britain isolated had been the basis of the military
directives laid down by Keitel, in line with Hitler’s instructions, in
November 1938. The priority which Hitler accorded in January
1939 to the navy’s Z-Plan, for building a big battle-fleet directed
squarely at British naval power, indicates that he was looking at this
stage to an eventual showdown with the western powers as the
prime military objective. The construction at the same time of an
‘East Wall’ — limited defensive fortifications for the event of
possible conflict with Poland over Danzig — is a further pointer in
that direction. Russia, and the eradication of Bolshevism, could
wait. But neither Hitler nor anyone in his entourage expected war

with Britain and France to come about in the way that it would do
that autumn.

In the late autumn and winter of 1938-9, differing views about
foreign-policy aims and methods existed within the German
leadership. Long-term military preparations were directed towards
eventual confrontation with the West, but it was well recognized
that the armed forces were years away from being ready for any
conflict with Britain and France. As in 1938, military leaders’ prime
fear was confrontation being forced on Germany too soon through
impetuous actions and an over-risky foreign policy. Goring and
Ribbentrop were advocating diametrically opposed policies towards
Britain. Goring’s hopes still rested on an expansive policy in south-
eastern Europe, backed for the foreseeable future by an
understanding with Britain. Ribbentrop, by now violently anti-
British, was pinning his hopes on smoothing the problems on
Germany’s eastern front and tightening the alliance with Italy and
Japan to prepare the ground for a move against Britain as soon as
was feasible. But at this stage, Goring’s star was temporarily on the
wane and Ribbentrop’s usually clumsy diplomacy was meeting in
most instances with little success. Hitler’s thoughts, whether or not
influenced by Ribbentrop’s reasoning, were broadly consonant with
those of his Foreign Minister. The coming showdown with
Bolshevism, though certainly not displaced in Hitler’s own mind as
the decisive struggle to be faced at some point in the future, had by
now moved again into the shadows. But he was, as usual, content to
keep his options open and await developments.

The one certainty was that developments would occur, thus
providing the opportunity for German expansion. For there was no
agency of power or influence in the Third Reich advocating drawing
a line under the territorial gains already made. All power-groups
were looking to further expansion — with or without war.

Military, strategic, and power-political arguments for expansion
were underpinned by economic considerations. By late 1938, the
pressures of the forced rearmament programme were making
themselves acutely felt. The policy of ‘rearm, whatever the cost’

was now plainly showing itself to be sustainable only in the short
term. Further expansion was necessary if the tensions built into the
overheated armaments-driven economy were not to reach explosion
point. By 1938-9, it was absolutely evident that further expansion
could not be postponed indefinitely if the economic impasses were
to be surmounted.

In early January 1939, the Reichsbank Directorate sent Hitler a
submission, supported by eight signatories, demanding financial
restraint to avoid the ‘threatening danger of inflation’. Hitler’s
reaction was: ‘That is mutiny!’ Twelve days later, Schacht was
sacked as President of the Reichsbank. But the Cassandra voices
were not exaggerating. Nor would the problem go away by sacking
Schacht. The insatiable demand for raw materials at the same time
that consumer demand in the wake of the armaments boom was
rising had left public finances in a desolate state.

Beyond the crisis in public finances, the labour shortage which
had been growing rapidly since 1937 was by this time posing a real
threat both to agriculture and to industry. The only remedy for the
foreseeable future was the use of ‘foreign labourers’ that war and
expansion would bring. The mounting economic problems
confirmed for Hitler his diagnosis that Germany’s position could
never be strengthened without territorial conquest.

Hitler’s regrets over the Munich Agreement and feeling that a
chance had been lost to occupy the whole of Czechoslovakia at one
fell swoop had grown rather than diminished during the last months
of 1938. His impatience to act had mounted accordingly. He was
determined not to be hemmed in by the western powers. He was
more than ever convinced that they would not have fought for
Czechoslovakia, and that they would and could do nothing to
prevent Germany extending its dominance in central and eastern
Europe. On the other hand, as he had indicated to Goebbels in
October, he was certain that Britain would not concede German

hegemony in Europe without a fight at some time. The setback
which Munich had been in his eyes confirmed his view that war
against the West was coming, probably sooner than he had once
envisaged, and that there was no time to lose if Germany were to
retain its advantage.

Already on 21 October 1938, only three weeks after the Munich
settlement, Hitler had given the Wehrmacht a new directive to
prepare for the ‘liquidation of remainder of the Czech state’. Why
was Hitler so insistent on this? Politically it was not necessary.
Indeed, the German leadership cannot fail to have recognized that
an invasion of Czechoslovakia, tearing up the Munich Agreement
and breaking solemn promises given only such a short time earlier,
would inevitably have the most serious international repercussions.

Part of the answer is doubtless to be found in Hitler’s own
personality and psychology. His Austrian background and dislike of
Czechs since his youth was probably one element. Yet after
occupation, the persecution of the Czechs was by no means as harsh
as that subsequently meted out to the conquered Poles. And,
following his victorious entry into Prague, Hitler showed
remarkably little interest in the Czechs.

More important, certainly, was the feeling that he had been
‘cheated’ out of his triumph, his ‘unalterable wish’ altered by
western politicians. ‘That fellow Chamberlain has spoiled my entry
into Prague,’ he was overheard saying on his return to Berlin after
the agreement at Munich the previous autumn. And yet, Goebbels’s
diary entries show that Hitler had decided before Munich that he
would temporarily concede to the western powers, but gobble up
the rest of Czechoslovakia in due course, and that the acquisition of
the Sudetenland would make that second stage easier. Though a
rationalization of the position Hitler had been manoeuvred into, it
indicates the acceptance by that date of a two-stage plan to acquire
the whole of Czechoslovakia, and does not highlight vengeance as a
motive.

There were other reasons for occupying the rump of
Czechoslovakia that went beyond Hitler’s personal motivation.

Economic considerations were of obvious importance. However
pliant the Czechs were prepared to be, the fact remained that even
after the transfer of October 1938, which brought major raw
material deposits to the Reich, immense resources remained in
Czecho-Slovakia (as the country, the meaningful hyphen inserted,
was now Officially called) and outside direct German control. The
vast bulk of the industrial wealth and resources of the country lay in
the old Czech heartlands of Bohemia and Moravia, not in the largely
agricultural Slovakia. An estimated four-fifths of engineering,
machine-tool construction, and electrical industries remained in the
hands of the Czechs. Textiles, chemicals, and the glass industry were
other significant industries that beckoned the Germans. Not least,
the Skoda works produced locomotives and machinery as well as
arms. Czecho-Slovakia also possessed large quantities of gold and
foreign currency that could certainly help relieve some of the
shortages of the Four-Year Plan. And a vast amount of equipment
could be taken over and redeployed to the advantage of the German
army. The Czech arsenal was easily the greatest among the smaller
countries of central Europe. The Czech machine-guns, field-guns,
and anti-aircraft guns were thought to be better than the German
equivalents. They would all be taken over by the Reich, as well as
the heavy guns built at the Skoda factories. It was subsequently
estimated that enough arms had fallen into Hitler’s possession to
equip a further twenty divisions.

But of even greater importance than direct economic gain and
exploitation was the military-strategic position of what remained of
CzechoSlovakia. As long as the Czechs retained some autonomy, and
possession of extensive military equipment and industrial resources,
potential difficulties from that quarter could not be ruled out in the
event of German involvement in hostilities. More important still:
possession of the rectangular, mountain-rimmed territories of
Bohemia and Moravia on the south-eastern edge of the Reich
offered a recognizable platform for further eastward expansion and
military domination. The road to the Balkans was now open.
Germany’s position against Poland was strengthened. And in the

event of conflict in the west, the defences in the east were
consolidated.

As late as December 1938, there was no indication that Hitler was
preparing an imminent strike against the Czechs. There were hints,
however, that the next moves in foreign policy would not be long
delayed. Hitler told Ernst Neumann, the German leader in Memel (a
seaport on the Baltic with a largely German population, which had
been removed from Germany by the Versailles Treaty), on 17
December that annexation of Memelland would take place in the
following March or April, and that he wanted no crisis in the area
before then. On 13 February, Hitler let it be known to a few
associates that he intended to take action against the Czechs in mid-
March. German propaganda was adjusted accordingly. The French
had already gleaned intelligence in early February that German
action against Prague would take place in about six weeks.

Hitler’s meeting at the Berghof with the Polish Foreign Minister
and strong man in the government, Jézef Beck, on 5 January had
proved, from the German point of view, disappointing. Hitler had
tried to appear accommodating in laying down the need for Danzig
to return to Germany, and for access routes across the Corridor to
East Prussia. Beck implied that public opinion in Poland would
prevent any concessions on Danzig. When Ribbentrop returned
empty-handed from his visit to Warsaw on 26 January, indicating
that the Poles were not to be moved, Hitler’s approach to Poland
changed markedly.

From friendly overtures, the policy moved to pressure. Poland
was to be excluded from any share in the spoils from the destruction
of the Czech state. And turning Slovakia into a German puppet-state
would intensify the threat to Poland’s southern border. Once the
demolition of Czecho-Slovakia had taken place, therefore, the
Germans hoped and expected the Poles to prove more cooperative.
The failure of negotiations with the Poles had probably accelerated
the decision to destroy the Czech state.

Around this time, according to Goebbels, Hitler spoke practically
of nothing else but foreign policy. ‘He’s always pondering new

plans,’ Goebbels noted. ‘A Napoleonic nature!’ The Propaganda
Minister had already guessed what was in store when Hitler told
him at the end of January he was going ‘to the mountain’ — to the
Obersalzberg — to think about his next steps in foreign policy.
‘Perhaps Czechia is up for it again. The problem is after all only half
solved,’ he wrote.

Ill

By the beginning of March, in the light of mounting Slovakian
nationalist clamour (abetted by Germany) for full independence
from Prague, the break-up of what was left of the state of Czecho-
Slovakia looked to close observers of the scene to be a matter of
time. When the Prague government deposed the Slovakian cabinet,
sent police in to occupy government offices in Bratislava, and placed
the former Prime Minister, Father Jozef Tiso, under house arrest,
Hitler spotted his moment. On 10 March, he told Goebbels,
Ribbentrop, and Keitel that he had decided to march in, smash the
rump Czech state, and occupy Prague. The invasion was to take
place five days later. ‘Our borders must stretch to the Carpathians,’
noted Goebbels. “The Fihrer shouts for joy. This game is dead
certain.’

On 12 March orders were given to the army and Luftwaffe to be
ready to enter Czecho-Slovakia at 6 a.m. on the 15th, but before
then not to approach within ten kilometres of the border. German
mobilization was by that stage so obvious that it seemed impossible
that the Czechs were unaware of what was happening. The
propaganda campaign against the Czechs had meanwhile been
sharply stepped up. That evening, Tiso had been visited by German
officials and invited to Berlin. The next day he met Hitler. He was
told the historic hour of the Slovaks had arrived. If they did
nothing, they would be swallowed up by Hungary. Tiso got the
message. By the following noon, 14 March, back in Bratislava, he
had the Slovak Assembly proclaim independence. The desired
request for ‘protection’ was, however, only forthcoming a day later,

after German warships on the Danube had trained their sights on
the Slovakian government offices.

Goebbels listened again to Hitler unfolding his plans. The entire
‘action’ would be over within eight days. The Germans would
already be in Prague within a day, their planes within two hours.
No bloodshed was expected. ‘Then the Fuhrer wants to fit in a
lengthy period of political calm,’ wrote Goebbels, adding that he did
not believe it, however enticing the prospect. A period of calm, he
thought, was necessary. ‘Gradually, the nerves aren’t coping.’

On the morning of 14 March, the anticipated request came from
Prague, seeking an audience of the Czech State President Dr Emil
Hacha with Hitler. Hacha, a small, shy, somewhat unworldly, and
also rather sickly man, in office since the previous November,
arrived in Berlin during the course of the evening, after a five-hour
train journey. Hitler kept him nervously waiting until midnight to
increase the pressure upon him - ‘the old tested methods of political
tactics’, as Goebbels put it. It was around 1 a.m. when, his face red
from nervousness and anxiety, the Czech President was eventually
ushered into the intimidating surroundings of Hitler’s grandiose
‘study’ in the New Reich Chancellery. A sizeable gathering,
including Ribbentrop, the head of his personal staff Walther Hewel,
Keitel, Weizsacker, State Secretary Otto Meissner, Press Chief Otto
Dietrich, and interpreter Paul Schmidt, were present. Goring,
summoned back from holiday, was also there.

Hitler was at his most intimidating. He launched into a violent
tirade against the Czechs and the ‘spirit of Benes’ which, he claimed,
still lived on. It was necessary in order to safeguard the Reich, he
continued, to impose a protectorate over the remainder of Czecho-
Slovakia. Hacha and Chvalkovsky, the Czech Foreign Minister, who
had accompanied the President to Berlin, sat stony-faced and
motionless. The entry of German troops was ‘irreversible’, ranted
Hitler. Keitel would confirm that they were already marching
towards the Czech border, and would cross it at 6 a.m. Hacha said
he wanted no bloodshed, and asked Hitler to halt the military build-
up. Hitler refused: it was impossible; the troops were already

mobilized. Goring intervened to add that his Luftwaffe would be
over Prague by dawn, and it was in Hacha’s hands whether bombs
fell on the beautiful city. At the threat, the Czech President fainted.
He was revived by an injection from Hitler’s personal physician, Dr
Morell.

Meanwhile, Prague could not be reached by telephone.
Eventually, contact was made. The browbeaten President went
immediately to the telephone and, on a crackly line, passed on his
orders that Czech troops were not to open fire on the invading
Germans. Just before 4 a.m., Hacha signed the declaration, placing
the fate of his people in the hands of the Leader of the German
Reich.

Overjoyed, Hitler went in to see his two secretaries, Christa
Schroeder and Gerda Daranowski, who had been on duty that night.
‘So, children,’ he burst out, pointing to his cheeks, ‘each of you give
me a kiss there and there ... This is the happiest day of my life.
What has been striven for in vain for centuries, I have been
fortunate enough to bring about. I have achieved the union of
Czechia with the Reich. Hacha has signed the agreement. I will go
down as the greatest German in history.’

Two hours after Hacha had signed, the German army crossed the
Czech borders and marched, on schedule, on Prague. By 9.00 a.m.
the forward units entered the Czech capital, making slow progress
on ice-bound roads, through mist and snow, the wintry weather
providing an appropriate backcloth to the end of central Europe’s
last, betrayed, democracy. The Czech troops, as ordered, remained
in their barracks and handed over their weapons.

Hitler left Berlin at midday, travelling in his special train as far as
Leipa, some sixty miles north of Prague, where he arrived during
the afternoon. A fleet of Mercedes was waiting to take him and his
entourage the remainder of the journey to Prague. It was snowing
heavily, but he stood for much of the way, his arm outstretched to
salute the unending columns of German soldiers they overtook.
Unlike his triumphal entries into Austria and the Sudetenland, only
a thin smattering of the population watched sullenly and helplessly

from the side of the road. A few dared to greet with clenched fists
as Hitler’s car passed by. But the streets were almost deserted by
the time he arrived in Prague in the early evening and drove up to
the Hradschin Castle, the ancient residence of the Kings of Bohemia.
When the people of Prague awoke next morning, they saw Hitler’s
standard fluttering on the castle. Twenty-four hours later he was
gone. For the Czechs, six long years of subjugation had begun.

Hitler returned to Berlin, via Vienna, on 19 March, to the
inevitable, and by now customary, triumphator’s reception. Despite
the freezing temperatures, huge numbers turned out to welcome the
hero. When Hitler descended from his train at the Gorlitzer
Bahnhof, Goring, tears in his eyes, greeted him with an address
embarrassing even by the prevailing standards of sycophancy.
Thousands cheered wildly as Hitler was driven to the Reich
Chancellery. The experienced hand of Dr Goebbels had organized
another massive spectacular. Searchlights formed a ‘tunnel of light’
along Unter den Linden. A brilliant display of fireworks followed.
Hitler then appeared on the balcony of the Reich Chancellery,
waving to the ecstatic crowd of his adoring subjects below.

The real response among the German people to the rape of
CzechoSlovakia was, however, more mixed — in any event less
euphoric — than that of the cheering multitudes, many of them
galvanized by party activists, in Berlin. This time there had been no
‘home-coming’ of ethnic Germans into the Reich. The vague notion
that Bohemia and Moravia had belonged to the ‘German living
space’ for a thousand years left most people cold — certainly most
north Germans who had traditionally had little or no connection
with the Czech lands. For many, as one report from a Nazi District
Leader put it, whatever the joy in the Fuhrer’s ‘great deeds’ and the
trust placed in him, ‘the needs and cares of daily life are so great
that the mood is very quickly gloomy again’. There was a good deal
of indifference, scepticism, and criticism, together with worries that
war was a big step closer. ‘Was that necessary?’ many people asked.
They remembered Hitler’s precise words following the Munich

Agreement, that the Sudetenland had been his ‘last territorial
demand’.

Hitler had been contemptuous of the western powers before the
taking of Prague. He correctly judged that once more they would
protest, but do nothing. However, everything points to the
conclusion that he miscalculated the response of Britain and France
after the invasion of Czecho-Slovakia. The initial reaction in London
was one of shock and dismay at the cynical demolition of the
Munich Agreement, despite the warnings the British government
had received. Appeasement policy lay shattered in the ruins of the
Czecho-Slovakian state. Hitler had broken his promise that he had
no further territorial demands to make. And the conquest of Czecho-
Slovakia had destroyed the fiction that Hitler’s policies were aimed
at the uniting of German peoples in a single state. Hitler, it was
now abundantly clear — a recognition at last and very late in the day
— could not be trusted. He would stop at nothing.

Chamberlain’s speech in Birmingham on 17 March hinted at a
new policy. ‘Is this the last attack upon a small State, or is it to be
followed by others?’ he asked. ‘Is this, in fact, a step in the direction
of an attempt to dominate the world by force?’ British public
opinion was in no doubt. Hitler had united a country deeply divided
over Munich. On all sides people were saying that war with
Germany was both inevitable and necessary. Recruitment for the
armed forces increased almost overnight. It was now clear both to
the man in the street and to the government: Hitler had to be
tackled.

The following day, 18 March, amid rumours circulating that
Germany was threatening Romania, the British cabinet endorsed the
Prime Minister’s recommendation of a fundamental change in
policy. No reliance could any longer be placed on the assurances of
the Nazi leaders, Chamberlain stated. The old policy of trying to
come to terms with the dictatorships on the assumption that they
had limited aims was no longer possible. The policy had shifted
from trying to appease Hitler to attempting to deter him. In any
new aggression, Germany would be faced at the outset with the

choice of pulling back or going to war. The Prime Minister had little
doubt as to where trouble might next flare up. ‘He thought that
Poland was very likely the key to the situation ... The time had now
come for those who were threatened by German aggression
(whether immediately or ultimately) to get together. We should
enquire how far Poland was prepared to go along these lines.’ The
British Guarantee to Poland and the genesis of the summer crisis
which, this time, would end in war were foreshadowed in
Chamberlain’s remarks.

Similar reactions were registered in Paris. Daladier let
Chamberlain know that the French would speed up rearmament and
resist any further aggression. The Americans were told that Daladier
was determined to go to war should the Germans act against Danzig
or Poland. Even strong advocates of appeasement were now saying
enough was enough: there would not be another Munich.

Before the Polish crisis unfolded, Hitler had one other triumph to
register — though compared with what had gone before, it was a
minor one. The incorporation of Memelland in the German Reich
was now to prove the last annexation without bloodshed. After its
removal from Germany in 1919, the Memel district, with a mainly
German population but a sizeable Lithuanian minority, had been
placed under French administration. The Lithuanians had marched
in, forcing the withdrawal of the French occupying force there in
January 1923. The following year, under international agreement,
the Memel had gained a level of independence, but remained in
effect a German enclave under Lithuanian tutelage.

Politically, the return of the territory to Germany was of no great
significance. Even symbolically, it was of relatively little
importance. Few ordinary Germans took more than a passing
interest in the incorporation of such a remote fleck of territory into
the Reich. But the acquisition of a port on the Baltic, with the
possibility that Lithuania, too, might be turned into a German

satellite, had strategic relevance. Alongside the subordination to
German influence of Slovakia on the southern borders of Poland, it
gave a further edge to German pressure on the Poles.

On 20 March, Ribbentrop subjected the Lithuanian Foreign
Minister, Joseph Urb&ys, to the usual bullying tactics. Kowno would
be bombed, he threatened, if Germany’s demand for the immediate
return of the Memel were not met. UrbSys returned the next day, 21
March, to Kowno. The Lithuanians were in no mood for a fight. A
Lithuanian delegation was sent to Berlin to arrange the details. ‘If
you apply a bit of pressure, things happen,’ noted Goebbels, with
satisfaction.

Hitler left Berlin the following afternoon, 22 March, for
Swinemiinde, where, along with Raeder, he boarded the cruiser
Deutschland. Late that evening, Ribbentrop and UrbSys agreed terms
for the formal transfer of the Memel district to Germany. Hitler’s
decree was signed the next morning, 23 March. He was back in
Berlin by noon next day. This time, he dispensed with the hero’s
return. Triumphal entries to Berlin could not be allowed to become
so frequent that they were routine.

Wasting no time, Ribbentrop had pushed Ambassador Lipski on
21 March to arrange a visit to Berlin by Beck. He indicated that
Hitler was losing patience, and that the German press was straining
at the leash to be turned loose on the Poles. He repeated the
requests about Danzig and the Corridor. In return, Poland might be
tempted by the exploitation of Slovakia and the Ukraine.

But the Poles were not prepared to act according to the script.
Beck, noting Chamberlain’s Birmingham speech, secretly put out
feelers to London for a bilateral agreement with Britain.
Meanwhile, the Poles mobilized their troops. On 25 March, Hitler
still indicated that he did not want to solve the Danzig question by
force to avoid driving the Poles into the arms of the British. He had
remarked to Goebbels the previous evening that he hoped the Poles
would respond to pressure, ‘but we must bite into the sour apple
and guarantee Poland’s borders’.

However, just after noon on 26 March, instead of the desired visit
by Beck, Lipski simply presented Ribbentrop with a memorandum
representing the Polish Foreign Minister’s views. It flatly rejected
the German proposals, reminding Ribbentrop for good measure of
Hitler’s verbal assurance in his speech on 20 February 1938 that
Poland’s rights and interests would be respected. Ribbentrop lost his
temper. Going beyond his mandate from Hitler, he told Lipski that
any Polish action against Danzig (of which there was no indication)
would be treated as aggression against the Reich. The bullying
attempt was lost on Lipski. He replied that any furtherance of
German plans directed at the return of Danzig to the Reich meant
war with Poland.

By 27 March, meanwhile, Chamberlain, warned that a German
strike against Poland might be imminent, was telling the British
cabinet he was prepared to offer a unilateral commitment to Poland,
aimed at stiffening Polish resolve and deterring Hitler. The policy
that had been developing since the march into Prague found its
expression in Chamberlain’s statement to the House of Commons on
31 March 1939: ‘In the event of any action which clearly threatened
Polish independence, and which the Polish Government accordingly
considered it vital to resist with their national forces, His Majesty’s
Government would feel themselves bound at once to lend the Polish
Government all support in their power.’

This was followed, at the end of Beck’s visit to London on 4-6
April, by Chamberlain’s announcement to the House of Commons
that Britain and Poland had agreed to sign a mutual assistance pact
in the event of an attack ‘by a European power’.

On hearing of the British Guarantee of 31 March, Hitler fell into a
rage. He thumped his fist on the marble-topped table of his study in
the Reich Chancellery. ‘I’ll brew them a devil’s potion,’ he fumed.

Exactly what he had wanted to avoid had happened. He had
expected the pressure on the Poles to work as easily as it had done
in the case of the Czechs and the Slovaks. He had presumed the
Poles would in due course see sense and yield Danzig and concede
the extra-territorial routes through the Corridor. He had taken it for

granted that Poland would then become a German satellite — an ally
in any later attack on the Soviet Union. He had been determined to
keep Poland out of Britain’s clutches. All of this was now upturned.
Danzig would have to be taken by force. He had been thwarted by
the British and spurned by the Poles. He would teach them a lesson.

Or so he thought. In reality, Hitler’s over-confidence, impatience,
and misreading of the impact of German aggression against Czecho-
Slovakia had produced a fateful miscalculation.

At the end of March Hitler had indicated to Brauchitsch, head of
the army, that he would use force against Poland if diplomacy
failed. Immediately, the branches of the armed forces began
preparing drafts of their own operational plans. These were
presented to Hitler in the huge ‘Fihrer type’ that he could read
without glasses. He added a preamble on political aims. By 3 April
the directive for ‘Case White’ (Fall Weis) was ready. It was issued
eight days later. Its first section, written by Hitler himself, began:
‘German relations with Poland continue to be based on the
principles of avoiding any disturbances. Should Poland, however,
change her policy towards Germany, which so far has been based on
the same principles as our own, and adopt a threatening attitude
towards Germany, a final settlement might become necessary in
spite of the Treaty in force with Poland. The aim then will be to
destroy Polish military strength, and create in the East a situation
which satisfies the requirements of national defence. The Free State
of Danzig will be proclaimed a part of the Reich territory by the
outbreak of hostilities at the latest. The political leaders consider it
their task in this case to isolate Poland if possible, that is to say, to
limit the war to Poland only.’ The Wehrmacht had to be ready to
carry out ‘Case White’ at any time after 1 September 1939.

Army commanders had been divided over the merits of attacking
Czecho-Slovakia only a few months earlier. Now, there was no sign
of hesitation. The aims of the coming campaign to destroy Poland
were outlined within a fortnight or so by Chief of the General Staff
Halder to generals and General Staff officers. Oppositional hopes of
staging a coup against Hitler the previous autumn, as the Sudeten

crisis was reaching its denouement, had centred upon Halder. At the
time, he had indeed been prepared to see Hitler assassinated. It was
the same Halder who now evidently relished the prospect of easy
and rapid victory over the Poles and envisaged subsequent conflict
with the Soviet Union or the western powers. Halder told senior
officers that ‘thanks to the outstanding, I might say, instinctively
sure policy of the Fihrer’, the military situation in central Europe
had changed fundamentally. As a consequence, the position of
Poland had also significantly altered. Halder said he was certain he
was speaking for many in his audience in commenting that with the
ending of ‘friendly relations’ with Poland ‘a stone has fallen from
the heart’. Poland was now to be ranked among Germany’s enemies.
The rest of Halder’s address dealt with the need to destroy Poland
‘in record speed’. The British guarantee would not prevent this
happening. He was contemptuous of the capabilities of the Polish
army. It formed ‘no serious opponent’. He outlined in some detail
the course the German attack would take, acknowledging
cooperation with the SS and the occupation of the country by the
paramilitary formations of the party. The aim, he repeated, was to
ensure ‘that Poland as rapidly as possible was not only defeated, but
liquidated’, whether France and Britain should intervene in the West
(which on balance he deemed unlikely) or not. The attack had to be
‘crushing’. He concluded by looking beyond the Polish conflict: ‘We
must be finished with Poland within three weeks, if possible already
in a fortnight. Then it will depend on the Russians whether the
eastern front becomes Europe’s fate or not. In any case, a victorious
army, filled with the spirit of gigantic victories attained, will be
ready either to confront Bolshevism or ... to be hurled against the
West ...’

On Poland, there was no divergence between Hitler and his Chief
of the General Staff. Both wanted to smash Poland at breakneck
speed, preferably in an isolated campaign but, if necessary, even
with western intervention (though both thought this more
improbable than probable). And both looked beyond Poland to a
widening of the conflict, eastwards or westwards, at some point.

Hitler could be satisfied. He need expect no problems this time from
his army leaders.

The contours for the summer crisis of 1939 had been drawn. It
would end not with the desired limited conflict to destroy Poland,
but with the major European powers locked in another continental
war. This was in the first instance a consequence of Hitler’s
miscalculation that spring. But, as Halder’s address to the generals
indicated, it had not been Hitler’s miscalculation alone.

Following one extraordinary triumph upon another, Hitler’s self-
belief had by this time been magnified into full-blown
megalomania. Even among his private guests at the Berghof, he
frequently compared himself with Napoleon, Bismarck, and other
great historical figures. The rebuilding programmes that constantly
preoccupied him were envisaged as his own lasting monument — a
testament of greatness like the buildings of the pharaohs or Caesars.
He felt he was walking with destiny. In the summer of 1939, such a
mentality would drive Germany towards European war.

Hitler made public the abrupt shift in policy towards Poland and
Great Britain in his big Reichstag speech of 28 April 1939. The
speech, lasting two hours and twenty minutes, had been occasioned
by a message sent by President Roosevelt a fortnight earlier.
Prompted by the invasion of Czecho-Slovakia, the President had
appealed to Hitler to give an assurance that he would desist from
any attack for the next twenty-five years on thirty named countries
— mainly European, but also including Iraq, Arabia, Syria, Palestine,
Egypt, and Iran. Were such an assurance to be given, the United
States, declared Roosevelt, would play its part in working for
disarmament and equal access to raw materials on world markets.
Hitler was incensed by Roosevelt’s telegram. That it had been
published in Washington before even being received in Berlin was
taken as a slight. Hitler also thought it arrogant in tone. And the
naming of the thirty countries allowed Hitler to claim that inquiries

had been conducted in each, and that none felt threatened by
Germany. Some, such as Syria, however, had been, he alleged,
unable to reply, since they were deprived of freedom and under the
military control of democratic states, while the Republic of Ireland,
he asserted, feared aggression from Britain, not from Germany.
Roosevelt’s raising of the disarmament issue (out of which Hitler
had made such capital a few years earlier) handed him a further
propaganda gift. With heavy sarcasm, he tore into Roosevelt,
‘answering’ his claims in twenty-one points, each cheered to the
rafters by the assembled members of the Reichstag, roaring with
laughter as he poured scorn on the President.

Many German listeners to the broadcast thought it one of the best
speeches he had made. William Shirer, the American journalist in
Berlin, was inclined to agree: ‘Hitler was a superb actor today,’ he
wrote. The performance was largely for internal consumption. The
outside world — at least those countries that felt they had
accommodated Hitler for too long — was less impressed.

Preceding the vaudeville, Hitler had chosen the occasion to
denounce the Non-Aggression Pact with Poland and the Naval
Agreement with Britain. He blamed the renunciation of the naval
pact on Britain’s ‘encirclement policy’. In reality, he was complying
with the interests of the German navy, which felt its construction
plans restricted by the agreement and had been pressing for some
time for Hitler to denounce it. The intransigence of the Poles over
Danzig and the Corridor, their mobilization in March, and the
alignment with Britain against Germany were given as reasons for
the ending of the Polish pact.

Since the end of March, which had brought the British guarantee
for Poland, followed soon afterwards by the announcement that
there was to be a British-Polish mutual assistance treaty, Hitler had
given up on the Poles. The military directives of early April were
recognition of this. The Poles, he acknowledged, were not going to
concede to German demands without a fight. So they would have
their fight. And they would be smashed. Only the timing and
conditions remained to be determined.

At a meeting in his study in the New Reich Chancellery on 23
May, Hitler outlined his thinking on Poland and on wider strategic
issues to a small group of top military leaders. He held out the
prospect not only of an attack on Poland, but also made clear that
the more far-reaching aim was to prepare for an inevitable
showdown with Britain. Unlike the meeting on 5 November 1937
that Hof$bach had recorded, there is no indication that the military
commanders were caused serious disquiet by what they heard.
Hitler made his intentions brutally clear. ‘It is not Danzig that is at
stake. For us it is a matter of expanding our living space in the East
and making food supplies secure and also solving the problem of the
Baltic States.’ It was necessary, he declared, ‘to attack Poland at the
first suitable opportunity. We cannot expect a repetition of Czechia.
There will be war. Our task is to isolate Poland. Success in isolating
her will be decisive.’ He reserved to himself, therefore, the timing
of any strike. Simultaneous conflict with the West had to be
avoided. Should it, however, come to that — Hitler revealed here his
priorities — ‘then the fight must be primarily against England and
France’. The war would be an all-out one: ‘We must then burn our
boats and it will no longer be a question of right or wrong but of to
be or not to be for 80 million people.’ A war of ten to fifteen years
had to be reckoned with. ‘The aim is always to bring England to its
knees,’ he stated. To the relief of those present, who took it as an
indication of when he envisaged the conflict with the West taking
place, he stipulated that the rearmament programmes were to be
targeted at 1943-4 - the same time-scale he had given in November
1937. But no one doubted that Hitler intended to attack Poland that
very year.

Throughout the spring and summer frenzied diplomatic efforts were
made to try to isolate Poland and deter the western powers from
becoming involved in what was intended as a localized conflict. On
22 May, Italy and Germany had signed the so-called ‘Pact of Steel’,

meant to warn Britain and France off backing Poland. Ribbentrop
had duped the Italians into signing the bilateral military pact on the
understanding that the Fuhrer wanted peace for five years and
expected the Poles to settle peacefully once they realized that
support from the West would not be forthcoming.

In the attempt to secure the assistance or benevolent neutrality of
a number of smaller European countries and prevent them being
drawn into the Anglo-French orbit, the German government had
mixed success. In the west, Belgian neutrality -— whatever Hitler’s
plans to ignore it when it suited him — was shored up to keep the
Western powers from immediate proximity to Germany’s industrial
heartlands. Every effort had been made in preceding years to
promote trading links with the neutral countries of Scandinavia to
sustain, above all, the vital imports of iron ore from Sweden. In the
Baltic, Latvia and Estonia agreed non-aggression pacts. In central
Europe, diplomatic efforts had more patchy results. Hungary,
Yugoslavia, and Turkey were unwilling to align themselves closely
with Berlin. But persistent pressure had turned Romania into an
economic satellite, sealed by treaty in late March 1939, more or less
assuring Germany of crucial access to Romanian oil and wheat in
the event of hostilities.

The big question-mark concerned the Soviet Union. The regime’s
anti-christ it might be. But it held the key to the destruction of
Poland. If the USSR could be prevented from linking hands with the
West in the tripartite pact that Britain and France were half-
heartedly working towards; better still, if the unthinkable — a pact
between the Soviet Union and the Reich itself — could be brought
about: then Poland would be totally isolated, at Germany’s mercy,
the Anglo-French guarantees worthless, and Britain — the main
opponent — hugely weakened. Such thoughts began to gestate in the
mind of Hitler’s Foreign Minister in the spring of 1939. In the
weeks that followed, it was Ribbentrop on the German side, rather
than a hesitant Hitler, who took the initiative in seeking to explore
all hints that the Russians might be interested in a rapprochement —
hints that had been forthcoming since March.

Within the Soviet leadership, the entrenched belief that the West
wanted to encourage German aggression in the east (that is, against
the USSR), the recognition that following Munich collective security
was dead, the need to head off any aggressive intent from the
Japanese in the east, and above all the desperate need to buy time
to secure defences for the onslaught thought certain to come at
some time, pushed — if for a considerable time only tentatively — in
the same direction.

Stalin’s speech to the Communist Party Congress on 10 March,
attacking the appeasement policy of the West as encouragement of
German aggression against the Soviet Union, and declaring his
unwillingness to ‘pull the chestnuts out of the fire’ for the benefit of
capitalist powers, had been taken by Ribbentrop as a hint that an
opportunity might be opening up. By mid-April the Soviet
Ambassador was remarking to Weizsacker that ideological
differences should not hinder better relations. Then, Gustav Hilger,
a long-serving diplomat in the German Embassy in Moscow, was
brought to the Berghof to explain that the dismissal, on 3 May, of
the Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov (who had been
associated with retaining close ties with the West, partly through a
spell as Soviet Ambassador to the USA, and was moreover a Jew),
and his replacement by Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin’s right-hand
man, had to be seen as a sign that the Soviet dictator was looking
for an agreement with Germany.

Around the same time, Ribbentrop heard from the German
Ambassador in Moscow, Count Friedrich Werner von der
Schulenburg, that the Soviet Union was interested in a
rapprochement with Germany. He scented a coup which would
dramatically turn the tables on Britain, the country which had dared
to spurn him — a coup that would also win him glory and favour in
the Ftihrer’s eyes, and his place in history as the architect of
Germany’s triumph. Hitler for his part thought that Russian
economic difficulties and the chance spotted by ‘the wily fox’ Stalin
to remove any threat from Poland to the Soviet western borders

were at the back of any opening towards Germany. His own
interests were to isolate Poland and deter Britain.

Ribbentrop was now able to persuade Hitler to agree to the
Soviet requests for resumption of trade negotiations with Moscow,
which had been broken off the previous February. Molotov told
Schulenburg, however, that a ‘political basis’ would have to be
found before talks could be resumed. He left unclear what he had in
mind. Deep suspicions on both sides led to relations cooling again
throughout June. Molotov continued to stonewall and keep his
options open. Desultory economic discussions were just kept alive.
But at the end of June, Hitler, irritated by the difficulties raised by
the Soviets in the trade discussions, ordered the ending of all talks.
This time the Soviets took the initiative. Within three weeks they
were letting it be known that trade talks could be resumed, and that
the prospects for an economic agreement were favourable. This was
the signal Berlin had been waiting for. Schulenburg in Moscow was
ordered to ‘pick up the threads again’.

On 26 June, Ribbentrop’s Russian expert in the Foreign Ministry’s
Trade Department, Karl Schnurre, indicated to the Soviet Chargé
d’Affaires Georgi Astakhov and trade representative Evgeny Babarin
that the trade agreement could be accompanied by a political
understanding between Germany and the Soviet Union, taking into
account their mutual territorial interests. The response was
encouraging. Molotov was non-committal and somewhat negative
when he met Schulenburg on 3 August. But two days later,
Astakhov was letting Ribbentrop know that the Soviet government
was seriously interested in the ‘improvement of mutual relations’,
and willing to contemplate political negotiations.

Towards the end of July, Hitler, Ribbentrop, and Weizsacker had
devised the basis of an agreement with the Soviet Union involving
the partition of Poland and the Baltic states. Hints about such an
arrangement were dropped to Molotov during his meeting with
Schulenburg on 3 August. Stalin was in no rush. He had learned
what the Germans were up to, and the broad timing of the intended
action against the Poles. But for Hitler there was not a moment to

lose. The attack on Poland could not be delayed. Autumn rains, he
told Count Ciano in mid-August, would turn the roads into a morass
and Poland into ‘one vast swamp ... completely unsuitable for any
military operations’. The strike had to come by the end of the
month.

Vil

Remarkably, for the best part of three months during this summer
of high drama, with Europe teetering on the brink of war, Hitler
was almost entirely absent from the seat of government in Berlin.
Much of the time, as always, when not at his alpine eyrie above
Berchtesgaden, he was travelling around Germany. Early in June he
visited the construction site of the Volkswagen factory at
Fallersleben, where he had laid the foundation stone a year or so
earlier. From there it was on to Vienna, to the ‘Reich Theatre
Week’, where he saw the premiere of Richard Straulfs’s Friedenstag,
regaling his adjutants with stories of his visits to the opera and
theatre there thirty years earlier, and lecturing them on the
splendours of Viennese architecture. Before leaving, he visited the
grave of his niece, Geli Raubal. He flew on to Linz, where he
criticized new worker flats because they lacked the balconies he
deemed essential in every apartment. From there he was driven to
Berchtesgaden via Lambach, Hafeld, and Fischlham — some of the
places associated with his childhood and where he had first attended
school.

At the beginning of July, he was in Rechlin in Mecklenburg,
inspecting new aircraft prototypes, including the He 176, the first
rocket-propelled plane, with a speed of almost 1,000 kilometres an
hour. Then in the middle of the month he attended an extraordinary
four-day spectacular in Munich, the ‘Rally of German Art 1939’,
culminating in a huge parade with massive floats and extravagant
costumes of bygone ages to illustrate 2,000 years of German
cultural achievement. Less than a week later he paid his regular
visit to the Bayreuth festival. At Haus Wahnfried, in the annexe that

the Wagner family had set aside specially for his use, Hitler felt
relaxed. There he was ‘Uncle Wolf ’, as he had been known by the
Wagners since his early days in politics. While in Bayreuth, looking
self-conscious in his white dinner-jacket, he attended performances
of Der fliegende Hollander, Tristan und Isolde, Die Walktire, and
Gotterdammerung, greeting the crowds as usual from the window on
the first floor.

There was also a second reunion (following their meeting the
previous year in Linz) with his boyhood friend August Kubizek.
They spoke of the old days in Linz and Vienna, going to Wagner
operas together. Kubizek sheepishly asked Hitler to sign dozens of
autographs to take back for his acquaintances. Hitler obliged. The
overawed Kubizek, the archetypal local-government officer of a
sleepy small town, carefully blotted every signature. They went out
for a while, reminiscing in the gathering dusk by Wagnet’s grave.
Then Hitler took Kubizek on a tour of Haus Wahnfried. Kubizek
reminded his former friend of the Rienzi episode in Linz all those
years ago. (Wagner’s early opera, based on the story of a
fourteenth-century ‘tribune of the people’ in Rome, had so excited
Hitler that late at night, after the performance, he had hauled his
friend up the Freinberg, a hill on the edge of Linz, and regaled him
about the meaning of what they had seen.) Hitler recounted the tale
to Winifried Wagner, ending by saying, with a great deal more
pathos than truth: ‘That’s when it began.’ Hitler probably believed
his own myth. Kubizek certainly did. Emotional and impressionable
as he always had been, and now a well-established victim of the
Fuhrer cult, he departed with tears in his eyes. Shortly afterwards,
he heard the crowds cheering as Hitler left.

Hitler spent most of August at the Berghof. Other than when he
had important visitors to see, daily life there retained its usual
patterns. Magda Goebbels told Ciano of her boredom. ‘It is always
Hitler who talks!’ he recalled her saying. ‘He can be Fuhrer as much
as he likes, but he always repeats himself and bores his guests.’

If less so than in Berlin, strict formalities were still observed. The
atmosphere was stuffy, especially in Hitler’s presence. Only Eva

Braun’s sister, Gretl, lightened it somewhat, even smoking (which
was much frowned upon), flirting with the orderlies, and
determined to have fun whatever dampening effect the Fuhrer
might have on things. What little humour otherwise surfaced was
often in dubious taste in the male-dominated household, where the
women in attendance, including Eva Braun, served mainly as
decoration. But in general, the tone was one of extreme politeness,
with much kissing of hands, and expressions of ‘Gnadige Frau’.
Despite Nazi mockery of the bourgeoisie, life at the Berghof was
imbued with the intensely bourgeois manners and fashions of the
arriviste Dictator.

Hitler’s lengthy absence from Berlin, while European peace hung
by a thread, illustrates how far the disintegration of anything
resembling a conventional central government had gone. Few
ministers were permitted to see him. Even the usual privileged few
had dwindled in number. Goebbels was still out of favour following
his affair with Lida Baarova. Goring had not recovered the ground
he had lost since Munich. Speer enjoyed the special status of the
protégé. He spent much of the summer at Berchtesgaden. But most
of the time he was indulging Hitler’s passion for architecture, not
discussing details of foreign policy. Hitler’s ‘advisers’ on the only
issue of real consequence, the question of war and peace, were now
largely confined to Ribbentrop, even more hawkish, if anything,
than he had been the previous summer, and the military leaders. On
the crucial matters of foreign policy, Ribbentrop — when not
represented through the head of his personal staff, Walther Hewel,
far more liked by the dictator and everyone else than the preening
Foreign Minister himself — largely had the field to himself. The
second man at the Foreign Ministry, Weizsacker, left to mind the
shop while his boss absented himself from Berlin, claimed not to
have seen Hitler, even from a distance, between May and the
middle of August. What the Dictator was up to on the Obersalzberg
was difficult to fathom in Berlin, Weizacker added.

The personalization of government in the hands of one man —
amounting in this case to concentration of power to determine over

War or peace — was as good as complete.

Vill

Danzig, allegedly the issue dragging Europe towards war, was in
reality no more than a pawn in the German game being played from
Berchtesgaden. Gauleiter Albert Forster — a thirty-seven-year-old
former Franconian bank clerk who had learnt some of his early
political lessons under Julius Streicher and had been leader of the
NSDAP in Danzig since 1930 — had received detailed instructions
from Hitler on a number of occasions throughout the summer on
how to keep tension simmering without allowing it to boil over. As
had been the case in the Sudetenland the previous year, it was
important not to force the issue too soon. Local issues had to chime
exactly with the timing determined by Hitler. Incidents were to be
manufactured to display to the population in the Reich, and to the
world outside, the alleged injustices perpetrated by the Poles
against the Germans in Danzig. Instances of mistreatment — most of
them contrived, some genuine — of the German minority in other
parts of Poland, too, provided regular fodder for an orchestrated
propaganda campaign which, again analogous to that against the
Czechs in 1938, had been screaming its banner headlines about the
iniquities of the Poles since May.

The propaganda certainly had its effect. The fear of war with the
western powers, while still widespread among the German
population, was — at least until August — nowhere near as acute as it
had been during the Sudeten crisis. People reasoned, with some
justification (and backed up by the German press), that despite the
guarantees for Poland, the West was hardly likely to fight for
Danzig when it had given in over the Sudetenland. Many thought
that Hitler had always pulled it off without bloodshed before, and
would do so again. Fears of war were nevertheless pervasive. The
more general feeling was probably better summed up in the report
from a small town in Upper Franconia at the end of July 1939: ‘The
answer to the question of how the problem “Danzig and the

Corridor” is to be solved is still the same among the general public:
incorporation in the Reich? Yes. Through war? No.’

But the anxiety about a general war over Danzig did not mean
that there was reluctance to see military action against Poland
undertaken — as long as the West could be kept out of it. Inciting
hatred of the Poles through propaganda was pushing at an open
door. ‘The mood of the people can be much more quickly whipped
up against the Poles than against any other neighbouring people,’
commented the exiled Social Democratic organization, the Sopade.
Many thought ‘it would serve the Poles right if they get it in the
neck’. Above all, no one, it was claimed, whatever their political
standpoint, wanted a Polish Danzig; the conviction that Danzig was
German was universal.

The issue which the Danzig Nazis exploited to heighten the
tension was the supervision of the Customs Office by Polish customs
inspectors. When the customs inspectors were informed on 4 August
— in what turned out to be an initiative of an over-zealous German
official — that they would not be allowed to carry out their duties
and responded with a threat to close the port to foodstuffs, the local
crisis threatened to boil over, and too soon. The Germans
reluctantly backed down - as the international press noted. Forster
was summoned to Berchtesgaden on 7 August and returned to
announce that the Fuhrer had reached the limits of his patience with
the Poles, who were probably acting under pressure from London
and Paris.

This allegation was transmitted by Forster to Carl Burckhardt, the
League of Nations High Commissioner in Danzig. Overlooking no
possibility of trying to keep the West out of his war with Poland,
Hitler was ready to use the representative of the detested League of
Nations as his intermediary. On 10 August, Burckhardt was
summoned to the telephone to be told by Gauleiter Forster that
Hitler wanted to see him on the Obersalzberg at 4 p.m. next day
and was sending his personal plane ready for departure early the
following morning. Following a flight in which he was regaled by a
euphoric Albert Forster with tales of beerhall fights with

Communists during the ‘time of struggle’, Burckhardt landed in
Salzburg and, after a quick snack, was driven up the spiralling road
beyond the Berghof itself and up to the ‘Eagle’s Nest’, the recently
built spectacular ‘Tea House’ in the dizzy heights of the mountain
peaks.

Hitler was not fond of the ‘Eagle’s Nest’ and seldom went up
there. He complained that the air was too thin at that height, and
bad for his blood pressure. He worried about an accident on the
roads Bormann had had constructed up the sheer mountainside, and
about a failure of the lift that had to carry its passengers from the
huge, marble-faced hall cut inside the rock to the summit of the
mountain, more than 150 feet above. But this was an important
visit. Hitler wanted to impress Burckhardt with the dramatic view
over the mountain tops, invoking the image of distant majesty, of
the Dictator of Germany as lord of all he surveyed.

He played every register in driving home to Burckhardt — and
through him to the western powers — the modesty and
reasonableness of his claims on Poland and the futility of western
support. Almost speechless with rage, he denounced press
suggestions that he had lost his nerve and been forced to give way
over the issue of the Polish customs officers. His voice rising until
he was shouting, he screamed his response to Polish ultimata: if the
smallest incident should take place, he would smash the Poles
without warning so that not a trace of Poland remained. If that
meant general war, then so be it. Germany had to live from its own
resources. That was the only issue; the rest nonsense. He accused
Britain and France of interference in the reasonable proposals he
had made to the Poles. Now the Poles had taken up a position that
blocked any agreement once and for all. His generals, hesitant the
previous year, were this time raring to be let loose against the
Poles.

Burckhardt, as intended, rapidly passed on to the British and
French governments the gist of his talks with Hitler. They drew no
conclusions from the report other than to urge restraint on the
Poles.

While Hitler and Burckhardt were meeting at the ‘Eagle’s Nest’ on
the Kehlstein, another meeting was taking place only a few miles
away, in Ribbentrop’s newly acquired splendrous residence
overlooking the lake in Fuschl, not far from Salzburg. Count Ciano,
resplendent in uniform, was learning from the German Foreign
Minister that the Italians had been deceived for months about
Hitler’s intentions. The atmosphere was icy. Ribbentrop told Ciano
that the ‘merciless destruction of Poland by Germany’ was
inevitable. The conflict would not become a general one. Were
Britain and France to intervene, they would be doomed to defeat.
But his information ‘and above all his psychological knowledge’ of
Britain, he insisted, made him rule out any intervention. Ciano
found him unreasoning and obstinate: ‘The decision to fight is
implacable. He [Ribbentrop] rejects any solution which might give
satisfaction to Germany and avoid the struggle.’

The impression was reinforced when Ciano visited the Berghof
next day. Hitler was convinced that the conflict would be localized,
that Britain and France, whatever noises they were making, would
not go to war. It would be necessary one day to fight the western
democracies. But he thought it ‘out of the question that this struggle
can begin now’. Ciano noted: ‘He has decided to strike, and strike
he will.’

Important news came through for Hitler at the very time that he
was underlining to the disenchanted Ciano his determination to
attack Poland no later than the end of August: the Russians were
prepared to begin talks in Moscow, including the position of Poland.
A beaming Ribbentrop took the telephone call at the Berghof. Hitler
was summoned from the meeting with Ciano, and rejoined it in high
spirits to report the breakthrough. The way was now open.

A flurry of diplomatic activity - Ribbentrop pressing with
maximum urgency for the earliest possible agreement, Molotov
cannily prevaricating until it was evident that Soviet interest in the
Anglo-French mission was dead — unfolded during the following
days. The text of a trade treaty, under which German manufactured
goods worth 200 million Reich Marks would be exchanged each

year for an equivalent amount of Soviet raw materials, was agreed.
Finally, on the evening of 19 August, the chattering teleprinter gave
Hitler and Ribbentrop, waiting anxiously at the Berghof, the news
they wanted: Stalin was willing to sign a non-aggression pact
without delay.

Only the proposed date of Ribbentrop’s visit - 26 August — posed
serious problems. It was the date Hitler had set for the invasion of
Poland. Hitler could not wait that long. On 20 August, he decided to
intervene personally. He telegraphed a message to Stalin, via the
German Embassy in Moscow, requesting the reception of
Ribbentrop, armed with full powers to sign a pact, on the 22nd or
23rd. Hitler’s intervention made a difference. But once more Stalin
and Molotov made Hitler sweat it out. The tension at the Berghof
was almost unbearable. It was more than twenty-four hours later,
on the evening of 21 August, before the message came through.
Stalin had agreed. Ribbentrop was expected in Moscow in two days’
time, on 23 August. Hitler slapped himself on the knee in delight.
Champagne all round was ordered — though Hitler did not touch
any. ‘That will really land them in the soup,’ he declared, referring
to the western powers.

‘We’re on top again. Now we can sleep more easily,’ recorded a
delighted Goebbels. “The question of Bolshevism is for the moment
of secondary importance,’ he later added, saying that was the
Fuhrer’s view, too. ‘We’re in need and eat then like the devil eats
flies.’ Abroad, Goebbels remarked, the announcement of the
imminent non-aggression pact was ‘the great world sensation’. But
the response was not that which Hitler and Ribbentrop had hoped
for. The Poles’ fatalistic reaction was that the pact would change
nothing. In Paris, where the news of the Soviet-German pact hit
especially hard, the French Foreign Minister Georges Bonnet,
fearing a German-Soviet entente against Poland, pondered whether
it was now better to press the Poles into compromise with Hitler in
order to win time for France to prepare its defences. But eventually,
after dithering for two days, the French government agreed that
France would remain true to its obligations. The British cabinet,

meeting on the afternoon of 22 August, was unmoved by the
dramatic news, even if MPs were asking searching questions about
the failure of British intelligence. The Foreign Secretary coolly, if
absurdly, dismissed the pact as perhaps of not very great
importance. Instructions went out to embassies that Britain’s
obligations to Poland remained unaltered. Sir Nevile Henderson’s
suggestion of a personal letter from the Prime Minister to Hitler,
warning him of Britain’s determination to stick by Poland, was
taken up.

Meanwhile, in excellent mood on account of his latest triumph,
Hitler prepared, on the morning of 22 August, to address all the
armed forces’ leaders on his plans for Poland. The meeting, at the
Berghof, had been arranged before the news from Moscow had
come through. Hitler’s aim was to convince the generals of the need
to attack Poland without delay. The diplomatic coup, by now in the
public domain, can only have boosted his self-confidence. It
certainly weakened any potential criticism from his audience.

Around fifty officers had assembled in the Great Hall of the
Berghof by the time that Hitler began his address at noon. ‘It was
clear to me that a conflict with Poland had to come sooner or later,’
began Hitler. ‘I had already made this decision in the spring, but I
thought that I would first turn against the West in a few years, and
only after that against the East.’ Circumstances had caused him to
change his thinking, he went on. He pointed in the first instance to
his own importance to the situation. Making no concessions to false
modesty, he claimed: ‘Essentially all depends on me, on my
existence, because of my political talents. Furthermore, the fact that
probably no one will ever again have the confidence of the whole
German people as I have. There will probably never again in the
future be a man with more authority than I have. My existence is
therefore a factor of great value. But I can be eliminated at any
time by a criminal or a lunatic.’ He also emphasized the personal
role of Mussolini and Franco, whereas Britain and France lacked any
‘outstanding personality’. He briefly alluded to Germany’s economic
difficulties as a further argument for not delaying action. ‘It is easy

for us to make decisions. We have nothing to lose; we have
everything to gain. Because of our restrictions our economic
situation is such that we can only hold out for a few more years.
Goring can confirm this. We have no other choice. We must act.’ He
reviewed the constellation of international forces, concluding: ‘All
these favourable circumstances will no longer prevail in two or
three years’ time. No one knows how much longer I shall live.
Therefore, better a conflict now.’

The high probability was that the West would not intervene, he
went on. There was a risk, but the risk had to be taken. ‘We are
faced,’ he stated with his usual apocalyptic dualism, ‘with the harsh
alternatives of striking or of certain annihilation sooner or later.’ He
compared the relative arms strength of Germany and the western
powers. He concluded that Britain was in no position to help
Poland. Nor was there any interest in Britain in a long war. The
West had vested its hopes in enmity between Germany and Russia.
‘The enemy did not reckon with my great strength of purpose,’ he
boasted. He had seen only puny figures in Munich. The pact with
Russia would be signed within two days. ‘Now Poland is in the
position in which I want her.’ There need be no fear of a blockade.
The East would provide the necessary grain, cattle, coal, lead, and
zinc. His only fear, Hitler said, in obvious allusion to Munich, was
‘that at the last moment some swine or other will yet submit to me
a plan for mediation’. He would provide a propaganda pretext for
beginning the war, however implausible. He ended by summarizing
his philosophy: ‘The victor will not be asked afterwards whether he
told the truth or not. When starting and waging a war it is not right
that matters, but victory. Close your hearts to pity. Act brutally.
Eighty million people must obtain what is their right. Their
existence must be made secure. The stronger man is right.’

If the generals were not enthused by what Hitler had to say, they
posed no objections. The mood was largely fatalistic, resigned. The
disastrous collapse in the army’s power since the first weeks of 1938
could not have been more apparent. Its still lamented former head,
Werner von Fritsch, had remarked to Ulrich von Hassell some

months earlier: ‘This man — Hitler — is Germany’s fate for good or
evil. If it’s now into the abyss, he’ll drag us all with him. There’s
nothing to be done.’ It was an indication of the capitulation of the
Wehrmacht leadership to Hitler’s will. Hitler’s own comments after
the meeting indicated that, on the eve of war, he had little
confidence in and much contempt for his generals.

Towards the end of his speech, Hitler had broken off momentarily
to wish his Foreign Minister success in Moscow. Ribbentrop left at
that point to fly to Berlin. In mid-evening, he then flew in Hitler’s
private Condor to Konigsberg and, after a restless and nervous night
preparing notes for the negotiations, from there, next morning, on
to the Russian capital. Within two hours of landing, Ribbentrop was
in the Kremlin. Attended by Schulenburg (the German Ambassador
in Moscow), he was taken to a long room where, to his surprise, not
just Molotov, but Stalin himself, awaited him. Ribbentrop began by
stating Germany’s wish for new relations on a lasting basis with the
Soviet Union. Stalin replied that, though the two countries had
‘poured buckets of filth’ over each other for years, there was no
obstacle to ending the quarrel. Discussion quickly moved to
delineation of spheres of influence. Stalin staked the USSR’s claim to
Finland, much of the territory of the Baltic states, and Bessarabia.
Ribbentrop predictably brought up Poland, and the need for a
demarcation line between the Soviet Union and Germany. This — to
run along the rivers Vistula, San, and Bug — was swiftly agreed.
Progress towards concluding a non-aggression pact was rapid. The
territorial changes to accompany it, carving up eastern Europe
between Germany and the Soviet Union, were contained in a secret
protocol. The only delay occurred when Stalin’s claims to the
Latvian ports of Libau (Liepaja) and Windau (Ventspils) held up
matters for a while. Ribbentrop felt he had to consult.

Nervously waiting at the Berghof, Hitler had by then already had
the Moscow embassy telephoned to inquire about progress at the
talks. He paced impatiently up and down on the terrace as the sky
silhouetted the Unterberg in striking colours of turquoise, then
violet, then fiery red. Below remarked that it pointed to a bloody

war. If so, replied Hitler, the sooner the better. The more time
passed, the bloodier the war would be.

Within minutes there was a call from Moscow. Ribbentrop
assured Hitler that the talks were going well, but asked about the
Latvian ports. Inside half an hour Hitler had consulted a map and
telephoned his reply: ‘Yes, agreed.’ The last obstacle was removed.
Back at the Kremlin in late evening there was a celebratory supper.
Vodka and Crimean sparkling wine lubricated the already
effervescent mood of mutual self-congratulation. Among the toasts
was one proposed by Stalin to Hitler. The texts of the Pact and
Protocol had been drawn up in the meantime. Though dated 23
August, they were finally signed by Ribbentrop and Molotov well
after midnight. Hitler and Goebbels had been half-watching a film,
still too nervous about what was happening in Moscow to enjoy it.
Finally, around 1 a.m., Ribbentrop telephoned again: complete
success. Hitler congratulated him. ‘That will hit like a bombshell,’
he remarked.

Relief as well as satisfaction was reflected in Hitler’s warm
welcome for Ribbentrop on the latter’s return next day to Berlin.
While his Foreign Minister had been in Moscow, Hitler had begun
to think that Britain might after all fight. Now, he was confident
that prospect had been ruled out.

While Ribbentrop had been on his way to Moscow, Sir Nevile
Henderson, the British Ambassador in Berlin, was flying to
Berchtesgaden to deliver the letter composed by the Prime Minister,
Neville Chamberlain, following the cabinet meeting on 22 August.
In his letter, Chamberlain emphasized his conviction ‘that war
between our two peoples would be the greatest calamity that could
occur’. But he left Hitler in no doubt about the British position. A
German-Soviet agreement would not alter Great Britain’s obligation
to Poland. Britain was, however, ready, if a peaceful atmosphere
could be created, to discuss all problems affecting relations with

Germany. And Britain was anxious for Poland and Germany to cease
their polemics and incitement in order to allow direct discussions
between the two countries on the reciprocal treatment of
minorities.

Accompanied by Weizsacker and Hewel, Henderson arrived at the
Berghof at 1 p.m. on 23 August. Hitler was at his most aggressive.
‘He made no long speeches but his language was violent and
exaggerated both as regards England and Poland,’ Henderson
reported. The German Chancellor launched into a series of wild
tirades about British support of the Czechs the previous year, and
now of the Poles, and how he had wanted only friendship with
Britain. He claimed Britain’s ‘blank cheque’ to Poland ruled out
negotiations. He was recriminatory, threatening, and totally
unyielding. He finally agreed to reply to Chamberlain within two
hours.

On return to Salzburg, Henderson was rapidly recalled to the
Berghof. This time the meeting was shorter — under half an hour.
Hitler was now calmer, but adamant that he would attack Poland if
another German were to be maltreated there. War would be all
Britain’s fault. ‘England’ (as he invariably called Britain) ‘was
determined to destroy and exterminate Germany,’ he went on. He
was now fifty years old. He preferred war at this point than in five
or ten years’ time. Henderson countered that talk of extermination
was absurd. Hitler replied that England was fighting for lesser
races, whereas he was fighting only for Germany. This time the
Germans would fight to the last man. It would have been different
in 1914 had he been Chancellor then. His repeated offers of
friendship to Britain had been contemptuously rejected. He had
come to the conclusion that England and Germany could never
agree. England had now forced him into the pact with Russia.
Henderson stated that war seemed inevitable if Hitler maintained
his direct action against Poland. Hitler ended by declaring that only
a complete change of British policy towards Germany could
convince him of the desire for good relations. The written reply to
Chamberlain that he handed to Henderson was couched in much the

same vein. It contained the threat — clear in implication if not
expression — to order general mobilization, were Britain and France
to mobilize their own forces.

Hitler’s tirades were, as so often, theatricals. They were a play-
acted attempt to break the British Guarantee to Poland by a
calculated demonstration of verbal brutality. As soon as Henderson
had left, Hitler slapped his thigh — his usual expression of self-
congratulation — and exclaimed to Weizsacker: ‘Chamberlain won’t
survive this discussion. His cabinet will fall this evening.’

Chamberlain’s government was still there next day. Hitler’s belief
in his own powers had outstripped realistic assessment. His
commment revealed how out of touch he was with the mood of the
British government, now fully backed by public opinion, by this
time. He was puzzled, therefore, the following day by the low-key
response in Britain to the Soviet Pact, and irritated by the speeches
made in Parliament by Chamberlain and Halifax reasserting
Britain’s resolve to uphold its obligations to Poland. Within twenty-
four hours Ribbentrop had persuaded him, since wielding the big
stick had produced little effect, to dangle the carrot.

At 12.45 p.m. on 25 August, Henderson was informed that Hitler
wished to see him at 1.30 p.m. in the Reich Chancellery. The
meeting lasted over an hour. Ribbentrop and the interpreter Paul
Schmidt were also present. Hitler was far calmer than he had been
in Berchtesgaden. He criticized Chamberlain’s speech. But he was
prepared to make Britain, he said, ‘a large comprehensive offer’ and
pledge himself to maintain the continued existence of the British
Empire once the Polish problem had been solved as a matter of
urgency. Hitler was so anxious that his ‘offer’ be immediately and
seriously considered that he suggested that Henderson fly to
London, and put a plane at his disposal. Henderson left next
morning.

The ‘offer’ to Britain was, in fact, no more than a ruse, another —
and by now increasingly desperate — attempt to detach Britain from
support for Poland, and prevent the intended localized war from
becoming a general European war. How honest Hitler’s ‘offer’ was

can be judged from the fact that at the very time that Henderson
was talking in the Reich Chancellery, final preparations were being
made for the start of ‘Case White’ next morning, Saturday, 26
August, at 4.30 a.m.

Already on 12 August, Hitler had set the likely date of the 26th
for the invasion of Poland. Goebbels learnt on the morning of the
25th that the mobilization was due to take place that afternoon. At
midday, Hitler then gave him propaganda instructions, emphasizing
that Germany had been given no choice but to fight against the
Poles, and preparing the people for a war, if necessary lasting
‘months and years’. Telephone communications between Berlin and
London and Paris were cut off for several hours that afternoon. The
Tannenberg celebrations and Party Rally were abruptly cancelled.
Airports were closed from 26 August. Food rationing was
introduced as from 27 August. By midday on the 25th, however,
even while Hitler was giving propaganda directives to Goebbels,
Keitel’s office was telephoning Halder to find out what was the
latest time for the march-order, since there might have to be a
postponement. The answer was given: no later than 3 p.m. The final
order was delayed at 1.30 p.m. because Henderson was at that time
in the Reich Chancellery. It was then further held back in the hope
that Mussolini would have replied to Hitler’s communication of
earlier that morning. Under pressure from the military timetable,
but anxious for news from Rome, Hitler put the attack on hold for
an hour. Finally, without receiving Mussolini’s answer, but able to
wait no longer, Hitler gave the order at 3.02 p.m. Directives for
mobilization were passed to the various troop commanders during
the afternoon. Then, amazingly, within five hours the order was
cancelled. To a great deal of muttering from army leaders about
incompetence, the complex machinery of invasion was halted just in
time.

Mussolini’s reply had arrived at 5.45 p.m. At 7.30 p.m.
Brauchitsch telephoned Halder to rescind the invasion order. A
shaken Hitler had changed his mind.

On 24 August Hitler had prepared a lengthy letter for Mussolini,
justifying the alliance with the Soviet Union, and indicating that a
strike against Poland was imminent. The letter was delivered by the
German Ambassador in Rome on the morning of the 25th.
Mussolini’s answer gave the over-confident Hitler an enormous
shock. The Duce did not beat about the bush: Italy was in no
position to offer military assistance at the present time. Hitler icily
dismissed Attolico, the Italian Ambassador. ‘The Italians are
behaving just like they did in 1914,’ Paul Schmidt heard Hitler
remark. ‘That alters the entire situation,’ judged Goebbels. ‘The
Fuhrer ponders and contemplates. That’s a serious blow for him.’
For an hour, the Reich Chancellery rang with comments of disgust
at the Axis partner. The word ‘treachery’ was on many lips.
Brauchitsch was hurriedly summoned. When he arrived, around
seven that evening, he told Hitler there was still time to halt the
attack, and recommended doing so to gain time for the Dictator’s
‘political game’. Hitler immediately took up the suggestion. At 7.45
p.m. a frantic order was dispatched to Halder to halt the start of
hostilities. Keitel emerged from Hitler’s room to tell an adjutant:
‘The march-order must be rescinded immediately.’

Another piece of bad news arrived for Hitler at much the same
time. Minutes before the news from Rome had arrived, Hitler had
heard from the French Ambassador, Robert Coulondre, that the
French, too, were determined to stick by their obligations to
Poland. This in itself was not critical. Hitler was confident that the
French could be kept out of the war, if London did not enter. Then
Ribbentrop arrived to tell him that the military alliance between
Great Britain and Poland agreed on 6 April had been signed late that
afternoon. This had happened after Hitler had made his ‘offer’ to
Henderson. Having just signed the alliance, it must have been plain
even to Hitler that Britain was unlikely to break it the very next
day. Yesterday’s hero, Ribbentrop, now found himself all at once
out of favour and, in the midst of a foreign-policy crisis on which
peace hinged, was not in evidence for over two days. Hitler turned
again to the Foreign Minister’s great rival, Goring.

Immediately, Goring inquired whether the cancellation of the
invasion was permanent. ‘No. I will have to see whether we can
eliminate England’s intervention,’ was the reply. When Goring’s
personal emissary, his Swedish friend, the industrialist Birger
Dahlerus, already in London to belabour Lord Halifax with similar
vague offers of German good intent that Henderson would shortly
bring via the official route, eventually managed, with much
difficulty, to place a telephone call to Berlin, he was asked to report
back to the Field-Marshal the following evening.

The mood in the Reich Chancellery had not been improved by the
message from Daladier on 26 August underlining France’s solidarity
with Poland. Things at the hub of the German government seemed
chaotic. No one had a clear idea of what was going on. Hewel, head
of Ribbentrop’s personal staff, though with different views from
those of his boss, warned Hitler not to underestimate the British. He
was a better judge of that than his Minister, he asserted. Hitler
angrily broke off the discussion. Brauchitsch thought Hitler did not
know what he should do.

Dahlerus certainly found him in a highly agitated state when he
was taken towards midnight to the Reich Chancellery. He had
brought with him a letter from Lord Halifax, indicating in non-
committal terms that negotiations were possible if force were not
used against Poland. It added in reality nothing to that which
Chamberlain had already stated in his letter of 22 August. It made
an impact on Goring, but Hitler did not even look at the letter
before launching into a lengthy diatribe, working himself into a
nervous frenzy, marching up and down the room, his eyes staring,
his voice at one moment indistinct, hurling out facts and figures
about the strength of the German armed forces, the next moment
shouting as if addressing a party meeting, threatening to annihilate
his enemies, giving Dahlerus the impression of someone ‘completely
abnormal’. Eventually, Hitler calmed down enough to list the points
of the offer which he wanted Dahlerus to take to London. Germany
wanted a pact or alliance with Britain, would guarantee the Polish
borders, and defend the British Empire (even against Italy, Goring

added). Britain was to help Germany acquire Danzig and the
Corridor, and have Germany’s colonies returned. Guarantees were
to be provided for the German minority in Poland. Hitler had
altered the stakes in a bid to break British backing for Poland. In
contrast to the ‘offer’ made to Henderson, the alliance with Britain
now appeared to be available before any settlement with Poland.

Dahlerus took the message to London next morning, 27 August.
The response was cool and sceptical. Dahlerus was sent back to
report that Britain was willing to reach an agreement with
Germany, but would not break its guarantee to Poland. Following
direct negotiations between Germany and Poland on borders and
minorities, the results would require international guarantee.
Colonies could be returned in due course, but not under threat of
war. The offer to defend the British Empire was rejected.
Astonishingly, to Dahlerus, back in Berlin late that evening, Hitler
accepted the terms, as long as the Poles had been immediately
instructed to contact Germany and begin negotiations. Halifax made
sure this was done. In Warsaw, Beck agreed to begin negotiations.
Meanwhile, the German mobilization, which had never been
cancelled along with the invasion, rolled on. Before Henderson
arrived back in Berlin to bring the official British response,
Brauchitsch informed Halder that Hitler had provisionally fixed the
new date for the attack as 1 September.

Henderson handed Hitler a translation of the British reply to his
‘offer’ of 25 August at 10.30 p.m. that evening, the 28th. Ribbentrop
and Schmidt were there. Hitler and Henderson spoke for over an
hour. For once, Hitler neither interrupted, nor harangued
Henderson. He was, according to the British Ambassador, polite,
reasonable, and not angered by what he read. The ‘friendly
atmosphere’ noted by Henderson was so only in relative terms.
Hitler still spoke of annihilating Poland. The British reply did not in
substance extend beyond the informal answer that Dahlerus had
conveyed (and had been composed after Hitler’s response to that
initiative was known). The British government insisted upon a prior
settlement of the differences between Germany and Poland. Britain

had already gained assurances of Poland’s willingness to negotiate.
Depending upon the outcome of any settlement and how it was
reached, Britain was prepared to work towards a lasting
understanding with Germany. But the obligation to Poland would be
honoured. Hitler promised a written reply the next day.

At 7.15 p.m. on the evening of 29 August, Henderson, sporting as
usual a dark red carnation in the buttonhole of his pin-striped suit,
passed down the darkened Wilhelmstrafse — Berlin was undergoing
experimental blackouts — through a silent, but not hostile, crowd of
300-400 Berliners, to be received at the Reich Chancellery as on the
previous night with a roll of drums and guard of honour. Otto
Meissner, whose role as head of the so-called Presidential
Chancellery was largely representational, and Wilhelm Brickner,
the chief adjutant, escorted him to Hitler. Ribbentrop was also
present. Hitler was in a less amenable mood than on the previous
evening. He gave Henderson his reply. He had again raised the
price — exactly as Henlein had been ordered to do in the
Sudetenland the previous year, so that it was impossible to meet it.
Hitler now demanded the arrival of a Polish emissary with full
powers by the following day, Wednesday, 30 August. Even the
pliant Henderson, protesting at the impossible time-limit for the
arrival of the Polish emissary, said it sounded like an ultimatum.
Hitler replied that his generals were pressing him for a decision.
They were unwilling to lose any more time because of the onset of
the rainy season in Poland. Henderson told Hitler that any attempt
to use force against Poland would inevitably result in conflict with
Britain.

When Henderson had left, the Italian Ambassador Attolico was
ushered in. He had come to tell Hitler that Mussolini was prepared
to intercede with Britain if required. The last thing Hitler wanted,
as he had made clear to his generals at the meeting on 22 August,
was a last-minute intercession to bring about a new Munich - least
of all from the partner who had just announced that he could not
stand by the pact so recently signed. Hitler coldly told Attolico that

direct negotiations with Britain were in hand and that he had
already declared his readiness to accept a Polish negotiator.

Hitler had been displeased at Henderson’s response to his reply to
the British government. He now called in Goring to send Dahlerus
once more on the unofficial route to let the British know the gist of
the ‘generous’ terms he was proposing to offer the Poles — return of
Danzig to Germany, and a plebiscite on the Corridor (with Germany
to be given a ‘corridor through the Corridor’ if the result went
Poland’s way). By 5 a.m. on 30 August, Dahlerus was again heading
for London in a German military plane. An hour earlier Henderson
had already conveyed Lord Halifax’s unsurprising response, that the
German request for the Polish emissary to appear that very day was
unreasonable.

During the day, while talking of peace Hitler prepared for war. In
the morning he instructed Albert Forster, a week earlier declared
Head of State in Danzig, on the action to be taken in the Free City
at the outbreak of hostilities. Later, he signed the decree to
establish a Ministerial Council for the Defence of the Reich with
wide powers to promulgate decrees. Chaired by Goring, its other
members were Hels as Deputy Leader of the Party, Frick as
plenipotentiary for Reich administration, Funk as plenipotentiary
for the economy, Lammers, the head of the Reich Chancellery, and
Keitel, chief of the High Command of the Wehrmacht. It had the
appearance of a ‘war cabinet’ to administer the Reich while Hitler
preoccupied himself with military matters. In reality, the
fragmentation of Reich government had gone too far for that.
Hitler’s own interest in preventing any centralized body operating
as a possible check on his own power was to mean that the
Ministerial Council was destined not to bring even a limited
resurrection of collective government.

Hitler spent much of the day working on his ‘proposals’ to be put
to the Polish negotiator who, predictably, never arrived. From the
outset it had not been a serious suggestion. But when Henderson
returned to the Reich Chancellery at midnight to present the British
reply to Hitler’s communication of the previous evening, he

encountered Ribbentrop in a highly nervous state and in a vile
temper. Diplomatic niceties were scarcely preserved. After
Ribbentrop had read out Hitler’s ‘proposals’ at breakneck speed, so
that Henderson was unable to note them down, he refused — on
Hitler’s express orders — to let the British Ambassador read the
document, then hurled it on the table stating that it was now out of
date, since no Polish emissary had arrived in Berlin by midnight. In
retrospect, Henderson thought that Ribbentrop ‘was wilfully
throwing away the last chance of a peaceful solution’.

There had, in fact, been no ‘last chance’. No Polish emissary had
been expected. Ribbentrop was concerned precisely not to hand over
terms which the British might have passed to the Poles, who might
have been prepared to discuss them. Hitler had needed his ‘generous
suggestion over the regulation of the Danzig and Corridor
Question’, as Schmidt later heard him say, as ‘an alibi, especially for
the German people, to show them that I have done everything to
preserve peace’.

The army had been told on 30 August to make all preparations
for attack on 1 September at 4.30 a.m. If negotiations in London
required a postponement, notification would be given before 3 p.m.
next day. ‘Armed intervention by Western powers now said to be
unavoidable,’ noted Halder. ‘In spite of this, Fiihrer has decided to
strike.’

When informed that Ribbentrop had arrived at the Reich
Chancellery, Hitler told him he had given the order, and that ‘things
were rolling’. Ribbentrop wished him luck. ‘It looks as if the die is
finally cast,’ wrote Goebbels.

After making his decision, Hitler cut himself off from external
contact. He refused to see the Polish Ambassador, Jozef Lipski, later
in the afternoon. Ribbentrop did see him a little later. But hearing
that the Ambassador carried no plenipotentiary powers to negotiate,
he immediately terminated the interview. Lipski returned to find
telephone lines to Warsaw had been cut off.

At 9 p.m. the German radio broadcast Hitler’s ‘sixteen-point
proposal’ which Ribbentrop had so crassly presented to Henderson

at midnight. By 10.30 p.m. the first reports were coming in of a
number of serious border incidents, including an armed ‘Polish’
assault on the German radio station at Gleiwitz in Upper Silesia.
These had been planned for weeks by Heydrich’s office, using SS
men dressed in Polish uniforms to carry out the attacks. To increase
the semblance of authenticity, a number of concentration-camp
inmates killed by lethal injections and carried to the sites provided
the bodies required.

Throughout Germany, people went about their daily business as
normal. But the normality was deceptive. All minds now were fixed
on the likelihood of war. A brief war, with scarcely any losses, and
confined to Poland, was one thing. But war with the West, which so
many with memories of the Great War of 1914-18 had dreaded for
years, now seemed almost certain. There was now no mood like
that of August 1914, no ‘hurrah-patriotism’. The faces of the people
told of their anxiety, fears, worries, and resigned acceptance of
what they were being faced with. ‘Everybody against the war,’
wrote the American correspondent William Shirer on 31 August.
‘How can a country go into a major war with a population so dead
against it?’ he asked. “Trust in the Fuhrer will now probably be
subjected to its hardest acid test,’ ran a report from the Upper
Franconian district of Ebermannstadt. “The overwhelming
proportion of people’s comrades expects from him the prevention of
the war, if otherwise impossible even at the cost of Danzig and the
Corridor.’

How accurate such a report was as a reflection of public opinion
cannot be ascertained. The question is in any case irrelevant.
Ordinary citizens, whatever their fears, were powerless to affect the
course of events. While many of them were fitfully sleeping in the
hope that even now, at the eleventh hour and beyond, some miracle
would preserve peace, the first shots were fired and bombs dropped
near Dirschau at 4.30 a.m. And just over quarter of an hour later in
Danzig harbour the elderly German battleship Schleswig-Holstein,
now a sea-cadet trainingship, focused its heavy guns on the fortified
Polish munitions depot on the Westerplatte and opened fire.

By late afternoon the army leadership reported: ‘Our troops have
crossed the frontier everywhere and are sweeping on toward their
objectives of the day, checked only slightly by the Polish forces
thrown against them.’ In Danzig itself, the purported objective of
the conflict between Germany and Poland, border posts and public
buildings manned by Poles had been attacked at dawn. The League
of Nations High Commissioner had been forced to leave, and the
swastika banner raised over his building. Gauleiter Albert Forster
proclaimed Danzig’s reincorporation in the Reich. In the turmoil of
the first day of hostilities, probably few people in Germany took
much notice.

On a grey, overcast morning Shirer had found the few people on
the streets apathetic. There were not many cheers from those thinly
lining the pavements when Hitler drove to the Reichstag shortly
before 10 a.m. A hundred or so deputies had been called up to serve
in the army. But Goring saw to it that there were no empty spaces
when Hitler spoke. The vacancies were simply filled by drafting in
party functionaries. Hitler, now wearing Wehrmacht uniform, was
on less than top form. He sounded strained. There was less cheering
than usual. After a lengthy justification of the alleged need for
Germany’s military action, he declared: ‘Poland has now last night
for the first time fired on our territory through regular soldiers.
Since 5.45 a.m.’ — he meant 4.45 a.m. — ‘the fire has been returned.
And from now on bomb will be met with bomb.’

Hitler had still not given up hope that the British could be kept
out of the conflict. On his return from the Reichstag he had Goring
summon Dahlerus to make a last attempt. But he wanted no outside
intercession, no repeat of Munich. Mussolini, under the influence of
Ciano and Attolico, and unhappy at Italy’s humiliation at being
unable to offer military support, had been trying for some days to
arrange a peace conference. He was now desperate, fearing attack
on Italy from Britain and France, to stop the war spreading. Before
seeing Dahlerus, Hitler sent the Duce a telegram explicitly stating
that he did not want his mediation. Then Dahlerus arrived. He
found Hitler in a nervous state. The odour from his mouth was so

strong that Dahlerus was tempted to move back a step or two.
Hitler was at his most implacable. He was determined to break
Polish resistance ‘and to annihilate the Polish people’, he told
Dahlerus. In the next breath he added that he was prepared for
further negotiations if the British wanted them. Again the threat
followed, in ever more hysterical tones. It was in British interests to
avoid a fight with him. But if Britain chose to fight, she would pay
dearly. He would fight for one, two, ten years if necessary.

Dahlerus’s reports of such hysteria could cut no ice in London.
Nor did an official approach on the evening of 2 September, inviting
Sir Horace Wilson to Berlin for talks with Hitler and Ribbentrop.
Wilson replied straightforwardly that German troops had first to be
withdrawn from Polish territory. Otherwise Britain would fight.
This was only to repeat the message which the British Ambassador
had already passed to Ribbentrop the previous evening. No reply to
that message was received. At 9 a.m. on 3 September, Henderson
handed the British ultimatum to the interpreter Paul Schmidt, in
place of Ribbentrop, who had been unwilling to meet the British
Ambassador. Unless assurances were forthcoming by 11 a.m. that
Germany was prepared to end its military action and withdraw from
Polish soil, the ultimatum read, ‘a state of war will exist between
the two countries as from that hour’. No such assurances were
forthcoming. ‘Consequently,’ Chamberlain broadcast to the British
people and immediately afterwards repeated in the House of
Commons, ‘this country is at war with Germany.’ The French
declaration of war followed that afternoon at 5 p.m.

Hitler had led Germany into the general European war he had
wanted to avoid for several more years. Military ‘insiders’ thought
the army, 2.3 million strong, through the rapidity of the
rearmament programme, was less prepared for a major war than it
had been in 1914. Hitler was fighting the war allied with the Soviet
Union, the ideological arch-enemy. And he was at war with Great
Britain, the would-be ‘friend’ he had for years tried to woo. Despite
all warnings, his plans — at every turn backed by his warmongering
Foreign Minister — had been predicated upon his assumption that

Britain would not enter the war, though he had shown himself
undeterred even by that eventuality. It was little wonder that, if
Paul Schmidt’s account is to be believed, when Hitler received the
British ultimatum on the morning of 3 September, he angrily turned
to Ribbentrop and asked: ‘What now?’

‘Responsibility for this terrible catastrophe lies on the shoulders of
one man,’ Chamberlain had told the House of Commons on 1
September, ‘the German Chancellor, who has not hesitated to
plunge the world into misery in order to serve his own senseless
ambitions.’ It was an understandable over-simplication. Such a
personalized view necessarily left out the sins of omission and
commission by others — including the British government and its
French allies — which had assisted in enabling Hitler to accumulate
such a unique basis of power that his actions could determine the
fate of Europe.

Internationally, Hitler’s combination of bullying and blackmail
could not have worked but for the fragility of the post-war
European settlement. The Treaty of Versailles had given Hitler the
basis for his rising demands, accelerating drastically in 1938-9. It
had provided the platform for ethnic unrest that Hitler could easily
exploit in the cauldron of central and eastern Europe. Not least, it
had left an uneasy guilt-complex in the West, especially in Britain.
Hitler might rant and exaggerate; his methods might be repellent;
but was there not some truth in what he was claiming? The western
governments, backed by their war-weary populations, anxious more
than all else to do everything possible to avoid a new conflagration,
their traditional diplomacy no match for unprecedented techniques
of lying and threatening, thought so, and went out of their way to
placate Hitler. By the time the western powers fully realized what
they were up against, they were no longer in any position to bring
the ‘mad dog’ to heel.

Within Germany, the fracturing of any semblance of collective
government over the previous six years left Hitler in the position
where he determined alone. No one doubted — the suffocating effect
of years of the expanding Fuhrer cult had seen to that — that he had
the right to decide, and that his decisions were to be implemented.
In the critical days, he saw a good deal of Ribbentrop, Goring,
Goebbels, Himmler, and Bormann. Other leading figures in the
party, government ministers, even court favourites like Speer, had
little or no contact with him. He was naturally also in constant
touch with the Wehrmacht leadership. But while Goebbels, for
instance, only learnt at second hand about military plans, leaders of
the armed forces often had less than full information, or were
belatedly told, about diplomatic developments. The cabinet, of
course, never met. Remarkable for a complex modern state, there
was no government beyond Hitler and whichever individuals he
chose to confer with at a particular time. Hitler was the only link of
the component parts of the regime. Only in his presence could the
key steps be taken. But those admitted to his presence, apart from
his usual entourage of secretaries, adjutants, and the like, were for
the most part officers needing operational guidelines or those like
Ribbentrop or Goebbels who thought like he did and were
dependent on him. Internal government of the Reich had become
Fuhrer autocracy.

For those in proximity to Hitler, the personalized decision-making
meant anything but consistency, clarity, and rationality. On the
contrary: it brought bewildering improvisation, rapid changes of
course, uncertainty. Hitler was living off his nerves. That conveyed
itself to others around him. External pressures of the course he had
embarked upon met Hitler’s personal psychology at this point. At
the age of fifty, men frequently ruminate on the ambitions they
had, and how the time to fulfil them is running out. For Hitler, a
man with an extraordinary ego and ambitions to go down in history
as the greatest German of all time, and a hypochondriac already
prepossessed with his own approaching death, the sense of ageing,

of youthful vigour disappearing, of no time to lose was hugely
magnified.

Hitler had felt time closing in on him, under pressure to act lest
the conditions became more disadvantageous. He had thought of
war against the West around 1943-5, against the Soviet Union —
though no time-scale was ever given — at some point after that. He
had never thought of avoiding war. On the contrary: reliving the
lost first great war made him predicate everything on victory in the
second great war to come. Germany’s future, he had never doubted
and had said so on innumerable occasions, could only be determined
through war. In the dualistic way in which he always thought,
victory would ensure survival, defeat would mean total eradication
— the end of the German people. War was for Hitler inevitable. Only
the timing and the direction were at issue. And there was no time to
wait. Starting from his own strange premisses, given Germany’s
strained resources and the rapid strides forward in rearmament by
Britain and France, there was a certain contorted logic in what he
said. Time was running out on the options for Hitler’s war.

This strong driving-force in Hitler’s mentality was compounded
by other strands of his extraordinary psychological make-up. The
years of spectacular successes — all attributed by Hitler to the
‘triumph of the will’ — and the undiluted adulation and sycophancy
that surrounded him at every turn, the Fuhrer cult on which the
‘system’ was built, had by now completely erased in him what little
sense of his own limitations had been present. This led him to a
calamitous over-estimation of his own abilities, coupled with an
extreme denigration of those — particularly in the military - who
argued more rationally for greater caution. It went hand in hand
with an equally disastrous refusal to contemplate compromise, let
alone retreat, as other than a sign of weakness. The experience of
the war and its traumatic outcome had doubtless cemented this
characteristic. It was certainly there in his early political career, for
instance at the time of the attempted putsch in Munich in 1923. But
it must have had deeper roots. Psychologists might have answers.
At any rate the behaviour trait, increasingly dangerous as Hitler’s

power expanded to threaten the peace of Europe, was redolent of
the spoilt child turned into the would-be macho-man. His inability
to comprehend the unwillingness of the British government to yield
to his threats produced tantrums of frustrated rage. The certainty
that he would get his way through bullying turned into blind fury
whenever his bluff was called. The purchase he placed on his own
image and standing was narcissistic in the extreme. The number of
times he recalled the Czech mobilization of May 1938, then the
Polish mobilization of March 1939, as a slight on his prestige was
telling. A heightened thirst for revenge was the lasting consequence.
Then the rescinding of the order to attack Poland on 26 August,
much criticized as a sign of incompetence by the military, he took
as a defeat in the eyes of his generals, feeling his prestige
threatened. The result was increased impatience to remedy this by a
new order at the earliest possible moment, from which there would
be no retreat.

Not just external circumstances, but also his personal psyche,
pushed him forwards, compelled the risk. Hitler’s reply on 29
August, when Goring suggested it was not necessary to ‘go for
broke’, was, therefore, absolutely in character: ‘In my life I’ve
always gone for broke.’ There was, for him, no other choice.

17
Licensing Barbarism

Hitler’s ‘mission’ since he entered politics had been to undo the stain
of defeat and humiliation in 1918 by destroying Germany’s enemies
— internal and external - and restoring national greatness. This
‘mission’, he had plainly stated on many occasions during the 1920s,
could only be accomplished through ‘the sword’. It meant war for
supremacy. The risk could not be avoided. ‘Germany will either be a
world power, or there will be no Germany,’ he had written in Mein
Kampf. Nothing had changed over the years in his fanatical belief in
this ‘mission’.

In war Nazism came into its own. The Nazi Movement had been
born out of a lost war. As with Hitler personally, the experience of
that war and erasing the stain of that defeat were at its heart.
‘National renewal’ and preparation for another war to establish the
dominance in Europe which the first great war had failed to attain
drove it forwards. The new war now brought the circumstances and
opportunities for the dramatic radicalization of Nazism’s ideological
crusade. Long-term goals seemed almost overnight to become
attainable policy objectives. Persecution which had targeted usually
disliked social minorities was now directed at an entire conquered
and subjugated people. The Jews, a tiny proportion of the German
population, were not only far more numerous in Poland, but were
despised by many within their native land and were now the lowest
of the low in the eyes of the brutal occupiers of the country.

As before the war, Hitler set the tone for the escalating
barbarism, approved of it, and sanctioned it. But his own actions
provide an inadequate explanation of such escalation. The

accelerated disintegration of any semblance of collective
government, the undermining of legality by an ever-encroaching
and ever-expanding police executive, and the power-ambitions of an
increasingly autonomous SS leadership all played important parts.
These processes had developed between 1933 and 1939 in the Reich
itself. They were now, once the occupation of Poland opened up
new vistas, to acquire a new momentum altogether. The planners
and organizers, theoreticians of domination, and technocrats of
power in the SS leadership saw Poland as an experimental
playground. They were granted a tabula rasa to undertake more or
less what they wanted. The Fuhrer’s ‘vision’ served as the
legitimation they needed. Party leaders put in to run the civilian
administration of the parts of Poland annexed to the Reich, backed
by thrusting and ‘inventive’ civil servants, also saw themselves as
‘working towards the Fuhrer’ in their efforts to bring about the
speediest possible ‘Germanization’ of their territories. And the
occupying army -— officers and rank-and-file — imbued with deep-
seated anti-Polish prejudice, also needed little encouragement in the
ruthlessness with which the conquered Poles were subjugated.

The ideological radicalization which took place in Poland in the
eighteen months following the German invasion was an essential
precursor to the plans which would unfold in spring 1941 as
preparation for the war which Hitler knew at some time he would
fight: the war against Bolshevik Russia.

Towards nine o’clock on the evening of 3 September, Hitler had
boarded his special armoured train in Berlin’s Stettiner Bahnhof and
left for the front. For much of the following three weeks, the train —
standing initially in Pomerania (Hinterpommern), then later in
Upper Silesia — formed the first wartime ‘Fuhrer Headquarters’.
Among Hitler’s accompaniment were two personal adjutants, for the
most part Wilhelm Briickner and Julius Schaub, two secretaries
(Christa Schroeder and Gerda Daranowski), two manservants, his
doctor, Karl Brandt (or sometimes his deputy, Hans-Karl von
Hasselbach), and his four military adjutants (Rudolf Schmundt, Karl-
Jesko von Puttkamer, Gerhard Engel, and Nicolaus von Below).

Behind Hitler’s carriage, the first on the train, containing his
spacious ‘living room’, sleeping compartment, and bathroom,
together with compartments for his adjutants, was the command
carriage that held communications equipment and a conference
room for meetings with military leaders. In the next carriage Martin
Bormann had his quarters. On the day of the invasion of Poland, he
had informed Lammers that he would ‘continue permanently to
belong to the Fuhrer’s entourage’. From now on, he was never far
from Hitler’s side — echoing the Fuhrer’s wishes, and constantly
reminding him of the need to keep up the ideological drive of the
regime.

The Polish troops, ill-equipped for modern warfare, were from
the outset no match for the invaders. Within the first two days,
most aerodromes and almost the whole of the Polish air force were
wiped out. The Polish defences were rapidly overrun, the army
swiftly in disarray. Already on 5 September Chief of Staff Halder
noted: ‘Enemy practically defeated.’ By the second week of fighting,
German forces had advanced to the outskirts of Warsaw. Hitler
seldom intervened in the military command. But he took the
keenest interest in the progress of the war. He would leave his train
most mornings by car to view a different part of the front line. His
secretaries, left behind to spend boring days in the airless railway
carriage parked in the glare of the blazing sun, tried to dissuade him
from touring the battle scenes standing in his car, as he did in
Germany. But Hitler was in his element. He was invigorated by
war.

On 19 September, Hitler entered Danzig to indescribable scenes
of jubilation. He took up accommodation for the next week in the
Casino-Hotel at the adjacent resort of Zoppot. From there, on the
22nd and again on the 25th, he flew to the outskirts of Warsaw to
view the devastation wrought on the city of a million souls by the
bombing and shelling he had ordered. By 27 September, when the
military commander of Warsaw eventually surrendered the city, he
was back in Berlin, returning quietly with no prearranged hero’s
reception. Poland no longer existed. An estimated 700,000 Polish

soldiers were taken prisoners of war. Around 70,000 were killed in
action, and a further 133,000 wounded. German fatalities numbered
about 11,000, with 30,000 wounded, and a further 3,400 missing.

Territorial and political plans for Poland were improvised and
amended as events unfolded in September and October 1939. On 7
September he had been ready to negotiate with the Poles,
recognizing a rump Polish state (with territorial concessions to
Germany and breaking of ties with Britain and France), together
with an independent western Ukraine. Five days later he still
favoured a quasi-autonomous Polish rump state with which he could
negotiate a peace in the east, and thought of limiting territorial
demands to Upper Silesia and the Corridor if the West stayed out.
Another option advanced by Ribbentrop was a division between
Germany and Russia, and the creation, out of the rump of Poland, of
an autonomous Galician and Polish Ukraine — a proposal unlikely to
commend itself to Moscow. The belated Soviet occupation of
eastern Poland on 17 September in any case promptly ruled out this
possibility. Hitler still left open the final shape of Poland in his
Danzig speech on 19 September. During the next days, Stalin made
plain his opposition to the existence of a Polish rump state. His
initial preference for the demarcation line along the line of the
Pissia, Narev, Vistula, and San rivers was then replaced by the
proposal to exchange central Polish territories within the Soviet
zone between the Vistula and Bug rivers for Lithuania. Once Hitler
had accepted this proposal — the basis of the German-Soviet Treaty
of Friendship signed on 28 September 1939 — the question of
whether or not there would be a Polish rump state was in Berlin’s
hands alone.

Hitler was still contemplating the possibility of some form of
Polish political entity at the end of the month. He held out the
prospect of recreating a truncated Polish state — though expressly
ruling out any recreation of the Poland of the Versailles settlement
— for the last time in his Reichstag speech of 6 October, as part of
his ‘peace offer’ to the West. But by then the provisional
arrangements set up to administer occupied Poland had in effect

already eliminated what remained of such a prospect. Even before
the formality of Chamberlain’s rejection of the ‘peace offer’ on 12
October, they had created their own dynamic militating towards a
rump Polish territory — the ‘General Government’, as it came to be
known -— alongside the substantial parts of the former Polish state to
be incorporated in the Reich itself.

By 26 October, through a series of decrees characterized by
extraordinary haste and improvisation, Hitler brought the military
administration of occupied Poland to an end, replacing it by civilian
rule in the hands of tried and tested ‘Old Fighters’ of the Movement.
Albert Forster, Gauleiter of Danzig, was made head of the new
Reichsgau of Danzig-West Prussia. Arthur Greiser, former President
of the Danzig Senate, was put in charge of the largest annexed area,
Reichsgau Posen (or ‘ReichsgauWartheland’, as it was soon to be
renamed, though generally known simply as the ‘Warthegau’). Hans
Frank, the party’s legal chief, was appointed General Governor in
the rump Polish territory. Other former Polish territory was added
to the existing Gaue of East Prussia and Silesia. In each of the
incorporated territories, most of all in the Wartheland, the
boundaries fixed during the course of October enclosed sizeable
areas which had never been part of the former Prussian provinces.
The borders of the Reich were thereby extended some 150-200
kilometres to the east. Only in the Danzig area were ethnic Germans
in the majority. Elsewhere in the incorporated territories the
proportion of Germans in the population seldom reached much over
10 per cent.

It was imperialist conquest, not revisionism. The treatment of the
people of the newly conquered territory was unprecedented, its
modern forms of barbarism evoking, though in even more terrible
fashion, the worst barbaric subjugations of bygone centuries. What
was once Poland amounted in the primitive view of its new
overlords to no more than a colonial territory in eastern Europe, its
resources to be plundered at will, its people regarded — with the
help of modern race theories overlaying old prejudice — as inferior
human beings to be treated as brutally as thought fit.

The terror unleashed from the first days of the invasion of Poland
left the violence, persecution, and discrimination that had taken
place in the Reich itself since 1933 - dreadful though that had been
— completely in the shade. The orgy of atrocities was unleashed
from above, exploiting in the initial stages the ethnic antagonism
which Nazi agitation and propaganda had done much to incite. The
radical, planned programme of ‘ethnic cleansing’ that followed was
authorized by Hitler himself. But its instigation — everything points
to this — almost certainly came from the SS leadership. The SS had
readily recognized the opportunities there to be grasped from
expansion. New possibilities for extending the tentacles of the police
state had opened up with the Anschlufs. Einsatzgruppen (task
forces) of the Security Police had been used there for the first time.
They had been deployed again in the Sudeten territory, then the rest
of Czecho-Slovakia, where there was even greater scope for the SS’s
attack on ‘enemies of the state’. The way was paved for the massive
escalation of uncontrolled brutality in Poland. Once more, five
(later six) Einsatzgruppen were sent into action. They interpreted
most liberally their brief to shoot ‘hostages’ in recrimination for any
show of hostility, or ‘insurgents’ — seen as anyone giving the
slightest indication of active opposition to the occupying forces. The
need to sustain good relations with the Wehrmacht initially
restricted the extent and arbitrariness of the shootings. It probably
also at first constrained the ‘action’ aimed at liquidating the Polish
nobility, clergy, and intelligentsia. This ‘action’ nevertheless
claimed ultimately an estimated 60,000 victims. Plainly, with the
occupation of Poland, the barbarities of the Einsatzgruppen had
moved on to a new plane. The platform was established for what
was subsequently to take place in the attack on the Soviet Union in
1941.

There was no shortage of eager helpers among the ethnic
Germans in the former Polish territories. The explosion of violence
recalled, in hugely magnified fashion, the wild and barbarous
treatment of ‘enemies of the state’ in Germany in spring 1933. But

now, after six years of cumulative onslaught on every tenet of
humane and civilized behaviour, and persistent indoctrination with
chauvinistic hatred, the penned-in aggression could be let loose
externally on a downtrodden and despised enemy.

Some of the worst German atrocities in the weeks following the
invasion were perpetrated by the Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz
(Ethnic German Self-Protection), a civilian militia established on
Hitler’s directions in the first days of September and within little
more than a week coming under the control of the SS. Himmler’s
adjutant, Ludolf von Alvensleben, took over its organization, and
later led the Selbstschutz in West Prussia, where the extent of its
brutality stood out even in the horrific catalogue of misdeeds of the
organization’s other branches. Especially in West Prussia, where
ethnic conflict had been at its fiercest, the Selbstschutz carried out
untold numbers of ‘executions’ of Polish civilians. The Selbstschutz
was eventually wound up — in West Prussia in November, and
elsewhere by early 1940 — but only because its uncontrolled
atrocities were becoming counter-productive on account of the
resulting conflicts with the army and German civil authorities in the
occupied areas.

The rampaging actions of the Selbstschutz were only one element
of the programme of radical ‘ethnic struggle’ designed by the SS
leadership for the ‘new order’ in Poland. More systematic ‘ethnic
cleansing’ operations, involving widespread liquidation of targeted
groups, were mainly in the hands of the Security Police
Einsatzgruppen, following in the wake of the military advance.
Already at the end of the first week of the invasion, Heydrich was
reported to be enraged — as, apparently, was Hitler too — at the
legalities of the military courts, despite 200 executions a day. He
was demanding shooting or hanging without trial. ‘The nobility,
clerics, and Jews must be done away with,’ were his reported
words. He repeated the same sentiments, referring to a general
‘ground cleansing’, to Halder’s Quartermaster-General Eduard
Wagner some days later. Reports of atrocities were not long in
arriving. By 10-11 September accounts were coming in of an SS

massacre of Jews herded into a church, and of an SS shooting of
large numbers of Jews. On 12 September Admiral Canaris, chief of
the Abwehr, told Keitel that he had heard ‘that extensive shootings
were planned in Poland and that especially the nobility and clergy
were to be exterminated’. Keitel replied ‘that this matter had
already been decided by the Fuhrer’. Chief of Staff Halder was
already by then heard to have said that ‘it was the intention of the
Fuhrer and of Goring to annihilate and exterminate the Polish
people’, and that ‘the rest could not even be hinted at in writing’.

What it amounted to — an all-out ‘ethnic cleansing’ programme —
was explained by Heydrich to the commanders of the
Einsatzgruppen on 21 September. The thinking was that the former
German provinces would become German Gaue. Another Gau with a
‘foreign-speaking population’ would be established, with its capital
in Cracow. An ‘eastern wall’ would surround the German provinces,
with the ‘foreign-speaking Gaw’ forming a type of ‘no man’s land’ in
front of it. The Reichsfihrer-SS was to be appointed Settlement
Commissar for the East (an appointment of vital importance, giving
Himmler immense, practically unrestricted powers in the east,
confirmed by secret edict of Hitler on 7 October). ‘The deportation
of Jews into the foreign-speaking Gau, expulsion over the
demarcation-line has been approved by the Fuhrer,’ Heydrich went
on. The process was to be spread over a year. As regards ‘the
solution of the Polish problem’, the 3 per cent at most of the Polish
leadership in the occupied territories ‘had to be rendered harmless’
and put in concentration camps. The Einsatzgruppen were to draw
up lists of significant leaders, and of various professional and
middle-class groups (including teachers and priests) who were to be
deported to the designated ‘dumping-ground’ of the General
Government. The ‘primitive Poles’ were to be used as migrant
workers and gradually deported to the ‘foreign-speaking Gau’. Jews
in rural areas were to be removed, and placed in towns. Jews were
systematically to be transported by goods-train from German areas.
Heydrich also envisaged the deportation to Poland of the Reich’s
Jews, and of 30,000 gypsies.

Hitler spoke little over a week later to Rosenberg of the
Germanization and deportation programme to be carried out in
Poland. The three weeks spent in Poland during the campaign had
confirmed his ingrained racial prejudices. ‘The Poles,’ Rosenberg
recalled him saying: ‘a thin Germanic layer, below that dreadful
material. The Jews, the most horrible thing imaginable. The towns
covered in dirt. He has learnt a lot in these weeks. Above all: if
Poland had ruled for a few decades over the old parts of the Reich,
everything would be lice-ridden and decayed. A clear, masterful
hand was now needed to rule here.’ Hitler then referred, along
similar lines to Heydrich’s address to his Einsatzgruppen chiefs, to
his plans for the conquered Polish territories. ‘He wanted to divide
the now established territory into three strips: 1. between the
Vistula and the Bug: the entire Jewry (also from the Reich) along
with all somehow unreliable elements. On the Vistula an invincible
Eastern Wall — even stronger than in the West. 2. Along the
previous border a broad belt of Germanization and colonization.
Here there would be a great task for the entire people: to create a
German granary, strong peasantry, to resettle there good Germans
from all over the world. 3. Between, a Polish “form of state”.
Whether after decades the settlement belt could be pushed forward
will have to be left to the future.’

A few days later, Hitler spoke to Goebbels in similar vein. ‘The
Fuhrer’s judgement on the Poles is annihilatory,’ Goebbels recorded.
‘More animals than human beings ... The filth of the Poles is
unimaginable.’ Hitler wanted no assimilation. “They should be
pushed into their reduced state’ - meaning the General Government
— ‘and left entirely among themselves.’ If Henry the Lion — the
mighty twelfth-century Duke of Saxony and Bavaria, who had
resettled peasants on lands in northern and eastern Germany — had
conquered the east, the result, given the scope of power available at
the time, would have been a ‘slavified’ German mongrel-race, Hitler
went on. ‘It’s all the better as it is. Now at least we know the laws
of race and can act accordingly.’

Hitler hinted in his Reichstag speech of 6 October, though in the
vaguest terms for public consumption, at ‘cleansing work’ and
massive ethnic resettlement as preparation for the ‘new order of
ethnographical relations’ in former Poland. Only in confidential
dealings with those in the regime’s leadership who needed to know
— a characteristic technique of his rule not to spread information
beyond essential limits — did Hitler speak frankly, as he had done to
Rosenberg and Goebbels, about what was intended. At a meeting on
17 October in the Reich Chancellery attended by Keitel, Frank,
Himmler, Hef’, Bormann, Lammers, Frick, and the State Secretary
in the Reich Ministry of the Interior, Stuckart, Hitler outlined the
draconian policy for Poland. The military should be happy to be
freed from administrative responsibility. The General Government
was not to become part of the Reich. It was not the task of the
administration there to run it like a model province or to establish a
sound economic and financial basis. The Polish intelligentsia were
to be deprived of any chance to develop into a ruling class. The
standard of living was to remain low: ‘We only want to get labour
supplies from there.’ The administration there was to be given a
free hand, independent of Berlin ministries. ‘We don’t want to do
anything there that we do in the Reich,’ was ominously noted.
Carrying out the work there would involve ‘a hard ethnic struggle
that will not permit any legal restrictions. The methods will not be
compatible with our normal principles.’ Rule over the area would
‘allow us to purify the Reich area too of Jews and Polacks’.
Cooperation of the General Government with the new Gaue of
Posen and West Prussia was to take place only for resettlement
purposes (through Himmler’s new role as head of the programme
for the ethnic reordering of Poland). ‘Cleverness and hardness in
this ethnic struggle,’ Hitler ended, with usual recourse to national
needs as justification, ‘must save us from again having to enter the
fields of slaughter on account of this land.’ ‘The devil’s work,’ he
called it.

Hitler’s approval for what Heydrich had set in motion cannot be
doubted. Referring back several months later to the chequered

relations of the SS and police in Poland with the army leadership,
Heydrich pointed out that the work of the Einsatzgruppen in Poland
was ‘in accordance with the special order of the Fuhrer’. The
‘political activity’ carried out in Poland by the Reichsfihrer-SS,
which had caused conflict with some of the army leadership, had
followed ‘the directives of the Fiihrer as well as the General Field-
Marshal’. He added ‘that the directives according to which the
police deployment took place were extraordinarily radical (e.g.
orders of liquidation for numerous sectors of the Polish leadership,
going into thousands)’. Since the order was not passed on to army
leaders, they had presumed that the police and SS were acting
arbitrarily.

Indeed, the army commanders on the ground in Poland had been
given no explicit instructions about any mandate from Hitler for the
murderous ‘ethnic cleansing’ policy of the SS and Security Police,
though Brauchitsch, like Keitel, was well aware of what was
intended. This was in itself characteristic of how the regime
functioned, and of Hitler’s keenness — through keeping full
knowledge to the smallest circle possible, and speaking for the most
part even there in generalities, however draconian — to cloud his
own responsibility. The army’s hands were far from unsullied by the
atrocities in Poland. Brauchitsch’s proclamation to the Poles on 1
September had told them that the Wehrmacht did not regard the
population as its enemy, and that all agreements on human rights
would be upheld. But already in the first weeks of September
numerous army reports recounted plundering, ‘arbitrary shootings’,
‘maltreatment of the unarmed, rapes’, ‘burning of synagogues’, and
massacres of Jews by soldiers of the Wehrmacht. The army leaders
— even the most pro-Nazi among them — nevertheless regarded such
repellent actions as serious lapses of discipline, not part of a
consistent racially motivated policy of unremitting ‘cleansing’ to be
furthered with all means possible, and sought to punish those
involved through the military courts. (In fact, most were amnestied
by Hitler through a decree on 4 October justifying German actions
as retaliation ‘out of bitterness for the atrocities committed by the

Poles’.) The commanders on the ground in Poland, harsh though
their own military rule was, did not see the atrocities which they
acknowledged among their own troops — in their view regrettable,
if inevitable, side-effects of the military conquest of a bitter enemy
and perceived ‘inferior’ people — as part of an exterminatory
programme of ‘ethnic struggle’. Their approach, draconian though
their treatment of the Poles was, differed strikingly from the
thinking of Hitler, Himmler, and Heydrich.

Gradually, in the second half of September the unease among
army commanders in Poland at the savagery of the SS’s actions
turned to unmistakable criticism. Awareness of this fed complaints
from the Nazi leadership about the ‘lack of understanding’ in the
army of what was required in the ‘ethnic struggle’. Hitler told
Goebbels on 13 October that the military in Poland were ‘too soft
and yielding’ and would be replaced as soon as possible by civil
administration. ‘Only force is effective with the Poles,’ he added.
‘Asia begins in Poland.’ On 17 October, in a step notably
contributing to the extension of the SS’s autonomy, Hitler removed
the SS and police from military jurisdiction.

The most forthright — and courageous — denunciations of the
continuing horrendous outrages of the SS were made in written
reports to Brauchitsch by Colonel-General Johannes Blaskowitz,
following the ending of military administration the commander of
the army in Poland. His reports condemned the ‘criminal atrocities,
maltreatment, and plundering carried out by the SS, police, and
administration’, castigating the ‘animal and pathological instincts’ of
the SS which had brought the slaughter of tens of thousands of Jews
and Poles. Blaskowitz feared ‘immeasurable brutalization and moral
debasement’ if the SS were not brought under control — something,
he said, which was increasingly impossible within Poland ‘since they
can well believe themselves officially authorized and justified in
committing any act of cruelty’. General Wilhelm Ulex, Commander-
in-Chief of the southern section of the front, reported in similar
vein.

The weak-kneed response of army Commander-in-Chief von
Brauchitsch — in effect an apologia for the barbaric ‘ethnic cleansing
policy authorized by Hitler — was fateful. It compromised the
position of the army, and pointed the way to the accommodation
between army and SS about the genocidal actions to be taken in the
Soviet Union in 1941. Brauchitsch spoke of ‘regrettable mistakes’ in
the ‘difficult solution’ of the ‘ethnic-political tasks’. After lengthy
discussions with the Reichsfiihrer-SS, he was confident that the
future would bring a change. Criticism endangering the ‘unity and
fighting power of the troops’ had to be prohibited. ‘The solution of
ethnic-political tasks, necessary for securing German living space
and ordered by the Fuhrer, had necessarily to lead to otherwise
unusual, harsh measures against the Polish population of the
occupied area,’ he stated. ‘The necessarily accelerated execution of
these tasks, caused by the imminently decisive struggle of the
German people, naturally brought about a further intensification of
these measures.’ Doubtless anticipating the inevitable explosion at
the inadequacies of the army, Brauchitsch did not even deliver
Blaskowitz’s reports in person to Hitler, but passed on at least the
first report on 18 November 1939 via Hitler’s army adjutant
Gerhard Engel. The expected ferocious denunciation of the ‘childish
attitudes’ in the army leadership inevitably followed. ‘You can’t
wage war with Salvation Army methods,’ Hitler raged.

The inquiries Himmler had set in train following the army
complaints predictably concluded that it was a matter only of
‘trivialities’. But the Reichsftihrer-SS was angered by the attacks. In
March 1940 he eventually sought an opportunity to address the
leaders of the army. He accepted responsibility for what had
happened, though played down the reports, attributing the accounts
of serious atrocities to rumour. According to the memory of one
participant, General Weichs, he added that ‘he was prepared, in
matters that seemed perhaps incomprehensible, to take on
responsibility before the people and the world, since the person of
the Fuhrer could not be connected with these things’. Another
participant, with more cause than most to take a keen interest in

Himmler’s comments, General Ulex, recalled the Reichsfiihrer-SS
saying: ‘I do nothing that the Fihrer does not know about.’

With the sanctioning of the liquidation programme at the core of
the barbaric ‘ethnic cleansing’ drive in Poland, Hitler — and the
regime he headed — had crossed the Rubicon. This was no longer a
display of outright brutality at home that shocked — as had the
massacre of the SA leadership in 1934, or even more so the
November Pogrom against the Jews in 1938 — precisely because the
structures and traditions of legality in the Reich, whatever the
inroads made into them, had not been totally undermined. In what
had once been Poland, the violence was unconstrained, systematic,
and on a scale never witnessed within the Reich itself. Law,
however draconian, counted for nothing. The police were given a
free hand. Even the incorporated areas were treated for policing
terms as outside the Reich. What was taking place in the conquered
territories fell, to be sure, still far short of the all-out genocide that
was to emerge during the Russian campaign in the summer of 1941.
But it had near-genocidal traits. It was the training-ground for what
was to follow.

Hitler’s remarks to Rosenberg and Goebbels illustrated how his
own impressions of the Poles provided for him the self-justification
for the drastic methods he had approved. He had unquestionably
been strengthened in these attitudes by Himmler and Heydrich.
Goebbels, too, played to Hitler’s prejudices in ventilating his own.
In mid-October Goebbels told him of the preliminary work carried
out on what was to become the nauseating antisemitic
‘documentary’ film Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew). Hitler listened
with great interest. What Goebbels said to Hitler might be implied
from his own reactions when he viewed the first pictures from what
he called the ‘ghetto film’. The appearance of the degraded and
downtrodden Jews, crushed under the Nazi yoke, had come to
resemble the caricature that Goebbels’s own propaganda had
produced. ‘Descriptions so terrible and brutal in detail that your
blood clots in your veins,’ he commented. ‘You shrink back at the
sight of such brutishness. This Jewry must be annihilated.’ A

fortnight or so later Goebbels showed Hitler the horrible ritual-
slaughter scenes from the film, and reported on his own impressions
— already pointing plainly in a genocidal direction — gleaned during
his visit to the Lodz ghetto: ‘It’s indescribable. Those are no longer
human beings. They are animals. So it’s not a humanitarian but a
surgical task. Otherwise Europe will perish through the Jewish
disease.’

In a most literal sense, Goebbels, Himmler, Heydrich, and other
leading Nazis were ‘working towards the Fuhrer’, whose authority
allowed the realization of their own fantasies. The same was true of
countless lesser figures in the racial experiment under way in the
occupied territories. Academics — historians at the forefront —
excelled themselves in justifying German hegemony in the east.
Racial ‘experts’ in the party set to work to construct the ‘scientific’
basis for the inferiority of the Poles. Armies of planners, moved to
the east, started to let their imagination run riot in devising
megalomaniac schemes for ethnic resettlement and social
restructuring. Hitler had to do no more than provide the general
licence for barbarism. There was no shortage of ready hands to put
it into practice.

This began with the heads of the civil administration in occupied
Poland. Forster in Danzig-West Prussia, Greiser in the Warthegau,
and Frank in the General Government were trusted ‘Old Fighters’,
hand-picked for the task by Hitler. They knew what was expected of
them. Regular and precise directives were not necessary.

The combined headship of state and party in the incorporated
area, following the structure used in the ‘Ostmark’ and Sudetenland,
provided far greater influence for the party than was the case in the
‘Old Reich’. Hitler’s attitude towards policy in the incorporated
territories was typical. He placed great value on giving his Gauleiter
the ‘necessary freedom of action’ to carry out their difficult tasks.
He stressed ‘that he only demanded a report from the Gauleiter
after ten years that their area was German, that is purely German.
He would not ask about the methods they had used to make the
area German, and it was immaterial to him if sometime in the

future it were established that the methods to win this territory
were not pretty or open to legal objection.’ The inevitable
consequence of this broad mandate — though it was alleged that it
ran counter to Hitler’s intention - was competition between Greiser
and his arch-rival Forster to be the first to announce that his Gau
was fully Germanized. Greiser and Forster went about meeting this
aim in different ways. While, to Himmler’s intense irritation,
Forster swept as many Poles in his area as possible into the third
group of the Deutsche Volksliste (German Ethnic List), giving them
German citizenship on approval (constantly subject, that is, to
revocation), Greiser pushed fanatically and ruthlessly for complete
apartheid — the maximum separation of the two ethnic groups. While
Forster frequently clashed with Himmler, Greiser gave full support
to the policies of the Reichsfiihrer-SS, and worked in the closest
cooperation with the Higher SS-and-Police Chief in the Warthegau,
Wilhelm Koppe.

The Warthegau turned years of indescribable torment for the
subjugated people into the nearest approximation to a vision of the
‘New Order’ in the east. The vast deportation and resettlement
programmes, the ruthless eradication of Polish cultural influence,
the mass-closing of Catholic churches and arrests or murder of
clergy, the eviction of Poles from their property, and the scarcely
believable levels of discrimination against the majority Polish
population — always accompanied by the threat of summary
execution — were carried out under the aegis of Greiser and Koppe
with little need to involve Hitler. Not least, the vicious drive by the
same pairing to rid their Germanized area of the lowest of the low —
the Jewish minority in the Warthegau — was to form a vital link in
the chain that would lead by late 1941 to the ‘Final Solution’.

The rapidity with which the geographical divisions and
administrative structure for the occupied territories of former
Poland had been improvised, the free hand given to party bosses,
the widespread autonomy which the police had obtained, and the
complete absence of legal constraint, had created a power free-for-
all in the ‘wild east’. But where conflict among the occupying

authorities was most endemic, as in the General Government, the
greatest concentration of power was plainly revealed to lie in the
hands of the Security Police, represented by the Higher SS-and-
Police Chief, backed by Himmler and Heydrich. Himmler’s ‘Black
Order’, under the Reichsfiihrer’s extended powers as Reich
Commissar for the Consolidation of Germandom, and mandated by
Hitler to ‘cleanse’ the east, had come into its own in the new
occupied territories.

Ill

Meanwhile, within the Reich itself the beginning of the war had
also marked a vital step in the descent into modern barbarism.
Here, too, Hitler now authorized mass murder.

Parallel to the murders in occupied Poland, it was an irreversible
advance in the direction of genocide. The programme —
euphemistically called the ‘euthanasia action’ — to kill the mentally
ill and others incurably sick that he launched in autumn 1939 was to
provide a gangway to the vaster extermination programme to come.
And, like the destruction of European Jewry, it was evidently linked
in his own mind with the war that, he was certain, would bring the
fulfilment of his ideological ‘mission’.

It was some time in October that Hitler had one of his secretaries
type, on his own headed notepaper and backdated to 1 September
1939 — the day that the war had begun - the single sentence:
‘Reichsleiter Bouhler and Dr med. Brandt are commissioned with the
responsibility of extending the authority of specified doctors so that,
after critical assessment of their condition, those adjudged incurably
ill can be granted mercy-death.’ He took a pen and signed his name
below this lapidary, open-ended death-sentence.

By this time, the killing of mental patients, already authorized
verbally by Hitler, was well under way. It suited neither Hitler’s
style nor his instinct to transmit lethal orders in writing. The reason
he did so on this one and only occasion was because of the
difficulties, in a land where the writ of law was still presumed to

run, already being encountered by those attempting, without any
obvious authority, to build an organization in conditions of secrecy
to implement a murderous mandate. Even then, knowledge of
Hitler’s written authorization was confined to as few persons as
possible. It was ten months later, on 27 August 1940, before even
the Reich Minister of Justice, Franz Gtirtner, faced with growing
criticism of the illegality of what was inevitably leaking more and
more into the open, was shown a facsimile of it.

Indeed, there was no basis of legality for what was taking place.
Hitler explicitly refused to have a ‘euthanasia’ law, rejecting the
prospect of a cumbersome bureaucracy and legal constraints. Even
according to the legal theories of the time, Hitler’s mandate could
not be regarded as a formal Fuhrer decree and did not, therefore,
possess the character of law. But an order from the Ftihrer,
whatever its legal status, was nonetheless seen as binding. That
applied also to Reich Justice Minister Gtirtner. Once he had seen
with his own eyes that Hitler’s will stood behind the liquidation of
the mentally sick, and that it was not the work of party underlings
operating without authority, he gave up his attempts on legal
grounds to block or regulate the killings. To a courageous district
judge, Lothar Kreyssig, who had written frank protest letters to him
about the crass illegality of the action, and on being shown Hitler’s
authorization had exclaimed that even on the basis of positive legal
theory wrong could not be turned into right, Gtirtner gave a simple
reply: ‘If you cannot recognize the will of the Fuhrer as a source of
law, as a basis of law, then you cannot remain a judge.’ Kreyssig’s
notice of retirement followed soon afterwards.

The exchange between Giirtner and Kreyssig shows how far the
acceptance of ‘Fuhrer power’ had undermined the essence of law.
The genesis of the ‘euthanasia action’ that Hitler authorized in
writing in October 1939 provides, beyond that, a classic example of
the way ‘working towards the Fuhrer’ converted an ideological goal
into realizable policy.

Hitler was indispensable to the process. His well-aired views from
the 1920s on ‘euthanasia’ served after 1933 as an encouragement to

those, most notably represented in the National Socialist Doctors’
League but by no means confined to fanatical Nazis, anxious to act
on the ‘problem’ of what they described as the ‘ballast’ of society.

The notion of the ‘destruction of life not worth living’ had
already been the subject of much public debate. Doctors had,
however, overwhelmingly rejected euthanasia during the Weimar
era. Hitler’s takeover of power changed the climate — and opened
up new possibilities to the medical profession. Some leading
psychiatrists were more than ready to exploit them. Hitler’s
presumed intentions provided guidelines for their endeavours, even
if the time was still not deemed right to introduce the programme
they wanted. Above all, Hitler’s role was decisive in 1938-9 in
providing approval for every step that extended into the full
‘euthanasia’ programme from the autumn of 1939 onwards. Without
that approval, it is plain, and without the ideological drive that he
embodied, there would have been no ‘euthanasia action’.

But the mentality which led to the killing of the mentally sick
was no creation of Hitler. Building on foundations firmly laid,
especially in the wake of the catastrophic public funding cuts during
the Depression years, the erection of the dictatorship had provided
licence to the medical and psychiatric professions after 1933 to
think the unthinkable. Minority views, constrained even in a failing
democracy, could now become mainstream. The process gathered
pace. By 1939, doctors and nurses attached to the asylums were
aware of what was required. So was the medical bureaucracy which
oiled the wheels of the killing machinery. The climate of opinion
among the general public was by this time also not unfavourable.
Though there were strong feelings against euthanasia, particularly
among those attached to the Churches, others were in favour —
notably, it seems, in the case of mentally ill or disabled children —
or at least passively prepared to accept it.

Finally, but not least, the point at which, coinciding with the
outbreak of war, a secret programme of mass murder could be
implemented would have been unimaginable without the

progressive erosion of legality and disintegration of formal
structures of government that had taken place since 1933.

Hitler had given a strong indication of his own thoughts on how
to deal with the incurably ill in Mein Kampf, where he advocated
their sterilization. When he spoke at the Nuremberg Party Rally in
1929 about how the weakest in society should be handled, the
economic argument used by the eugenics lobby in the medical
profession and others weighed less heavily than questions of ‘racial
hygiene’ and the ‘future maintenance of our ethnic strength, indeed
of our ethnic nationhood altogether’. ‘If Germany were to have a
million children a year,’ he declared, ‘and do away with 700,000-
800,000 of the weakest of them, the result would finally be perhaps
even a rise in strength.’ This implied racial engineering through
mass murder, justified through social-Darwinist ideology, not
‘euthanasia’ in the conventional sense as the voluntary release from
terminal illness.

According to the comments of his doctor, Karl Brandt, in his post-
war trial, Hitler was known to favour involuntary euthanasia at the
latest from 1933 onwards. His position was indicated in his reply in
1935 to the Reich Doctors’ Leader Gerhard Wagner. Evidently,
Wagner was pressing for radical measures to bring about the
‘destruction of life not worth living’. Hitler reportedly told him that
he would ‘take up and carry out the questions of euthanasia’ in the
event of a war. He was ‘of the opinion that such a problem could be
more smoothly and easily carried out in war’, and that resistance, as
was to be expected from the Churches, would then have less of an
impact than in peacetime. He intended, therefore, ‘in the event of a
war radically to solve the problem of the mental asylums’.

For the next three years, Hitler had little involvement with the
‘euthanasia’ issue. Others were more active. Evidently encouraged
by Hitler’s remarks that he did intend, once the opportunity
presented itself through the war for which the regime was
preparing, to introduce a ‘euthanasia programme’, Reich Doctors’
Leader Wagner pushed forward discussions on how the population
should be prepared for such action. Calculations were published on

the cost of upkeep of the mentally sick and hereditarily ill, instilling
the impression of what could be done for the good of the people
with vast resouces now being ‘wasted’ on ‘useless’ lives. Cameras
were sent into the asylums to produce scenes to horrify the German
public and convince them of the need to eliminate those portrayed
as the dregs of society for the good of the whole population. The
National Socialist Racial and Political Office produced five silent
films of this kind between 1935 and 1937.

Meanwhile, the ‘Chancellery of the Fuhrer of the NSDAP’, the
agency which would come to run the ‘euthanasia action’ from 1939
onwards, was doing all it could to expand its own power-base in the
political jungle of the Third Reich. Despite its impressive name, the
Fuhrer Chancellery had little actual power. Hitler had set it up at
the end of 1934 to deal with correspondence from party members
directed to himself as head of the NSDAP. It was officially meant to
serve as the agency to keep the Fuhrer in direct touch with the
concerns of his people. Much of the correspondence was a matter of
trivial complaints, petty grievances, and minor personal squabbles
of party members. But a vast number of letters to Hitler did pour in
after 1933 — around quarter of a million a year in the later 1930s.
And, to preserve the fiction of the Fuhrer listening to the cares of
his people, many of them needed attention.

Hitler put the Fithrer Chancellery under the control of Philipp
Bouhler — a member of the Party’s Reichsleitung (Reich Leadership)
since 1933, a quiet, bureaucratic type but intensely loyal and
deferential, and ideologically fanatical. Exploiting his direct
connections with Hitler, the vagueness of his remit, and the
randomness of the business that came the way of the organization
he headed, he was now able to expand his own little empire. Of the
various departments, the most important was Department (Amt) II
(from 1939 Main Department — Hauptamt) headed by Bouhler’s
deputy, Viktor Brack. This Department itself covered a wide range
of heterogeneous business but, in its section ‘IIb’, under Hans
Hefelmann, was responsible for handling petitions relating to the
Reich Ministry of the Interior, including sensitive issues touching on

the competence of the health department of the Ministry. Brack,
five years younger than Bouhler, was, if anything, even more
ambitious than his boss, and was ideologically attuned to what was
wanted. He was ready to grasp an opportunity when he saw one.

This came some time in the first months of 1939. Around that
time the father of a severely handicapped child — born blind, with
no left forearm and a deformed leg — in Pomfsen, near Leipzig, sent
in a petition to Hitler, asking for the child to be released through
mercy-killing. The petition arrived in Hefelmann’s office in the
Fuhrer Chancellery. Hefelmann did not consider involving either the
Reich Ministry of the Interior or the Reich Ministry of Justice. He
thought it should be taken to Hitler himself, to see how the Fuhrer
thought it should be handled. This was probably in May or June
1939. Hitler sent his doctor, Karl Brandt, to the University of
Leipzig Children’s Clinic, to consult the child’s doctors with the
mandate, if the position was as the father had described it, to
authorize the doctors in his name to carry out euthanasia. This was
done towards the end of July 1939. Soon after Brandt’s return, he
was verbally empowered by Hitler, as was Bouhler, to take similar
action should other cases arise. (The case of the child from PomfgSen
was evidently not an isolated instance around this time.) Whether
Hitler took this step unprompted, or whether it followed a
suggestion from Brandt or the ambitious Bouhler is not known. But
between February and May 1939 Hefelmann, on Brandt’s
instructions, carried out discussions with doctors known to be
sympathetic and eventually set up a camouflaged organization that
was given the title ‘Reich Committee for the Scientific Registration
of Serious Hereditary and Congenital Suffering’. Between 5,000 and
8,000 children are estimated to have been put to death, mostly with
injections of the barbiturate luminal, under its aegis.

In July Hitler told Lammers, Bormann, and Dr Leonardo Conti
(recently appointed Reich Health Leader and State Secretary for
Health in the Reich Ministry of the Interior) that he favoured
mercy-killing for seriously ill mental patients. Better use of
hospitals, doctors, and nursing staff could be made in war, he

stated. Conti was commissioned to investigate the feasibility of such
a programme. By then, war was looming. Hitler’s own comments
showed that he continued to see a ‘euthanasia programme’ in the
context of war. By that time, too, Hitler had probably received the
evaluation commissioned around the start of the year by Brack from
Dr Joseph Mayer, Professor of Moral Theology at the University of
Paderborn. Hitler had been uneasy about the likely reaction of the
Churches in the event of the introduction of a ‘euthanasia
programme’. He imagined both the Catholic and Protestant
Churches would outrightly oppose it. Mayer, who in 1927 had
published a tract in favour of the legal sterilization of the mentally
sick, was now asked to assess the attitude of the Catholic Church.
He sided with the right of the state to take the lives of the mentally
ill. Though this was against orthodox Catholic teaching, Mayer left
the impression that unequivocal opposition from the Churches was
not to be expected. This was the conclusion which Hitler apparently
drew, following further discreet inquiry. The biggest internal
obstacle to such a programme appeared to be surmountable. The
programme could go ahead.

The organization, set up to deal with the ‘euthanasia’ of children,
was to hand. Brack had heard indirectly of Hitler’s instructions to
Conti at the July meeting. Spotting his chance, but needing to act
without delay, if control were not to be lost to Conti and the Reich
Ministry of the Interior, he had Hefelmann draw up a short
statistical memorandum on the asylums and took it to Bouhler. The
head of the Fuhrer Chancellery had little difficulty in persuading
Hitler to extend the authorization he had earlier granted to himself
and Brandt to deal with the children’s ‘euthanasia’. It was in August
1939 that Hitler told Bouhler that he wanted the strictest secrecy
maintained, and ‘a completely unbureaucratic solution of this
problem’. The Reich Ministry of the Interior should be kept out of it
as far as possible.

Shortly after this, a sizeable number of doctors were summoned
to a meeting in the Reich Chancellery to seek their views on such a
programme. They were overwhelmingly in favour and ready to

cooperate. They suggested that around 60,000 patients might be
‘eligible’. The number involved meant there was a serious problem
about maintaining secrecy. Once more, camouflaged organizations
were needed. Three were set up to distribute questionnaires to the
asylums (the Reich Association of Asylums), handle personnel and
finance matters (Community Foundation for the Care of Asylums),
and organize transport (Community Patients’ Transport). They were
based, under Brack’s direction, in an unpretentious villa in Berlin-
Charlottenburg, Tiergartenstrafge 4, from which the entire
‘euthanasia action’ drew its code-name ‘T4’. Apart from Bouhler,
Brandt, and Brack the organization comprised 114 persons.

Plainly, the construction of such an organization and the
implementation of its gruesome task needed more than simply the
verbal authorization that had sufficed for the children’s ‘euthanasia’
up to then. This is what prompted Hitler’s almost casual written
authorization some weeks later, backdated (as we noted) to 1
September. This formless empowering, and the way the Fuhrer
Chancellery had been able, without the ministries of state even
being informed, to expropriate control over a programme calculated
to bring the deaths of tens of thousands in an action lacking any
basis in law, is the clearest indication of how far internal structures
of government had been deformed and superseded by executive
agencies devoted to implementing what they saw as the will of the
Fuhrer. The cloak-and-dagger secrecy — some leading figures,
including Brack, even worked with false names — highlighted the
illegality of what was taking place. The regime had taken the step
into outright criminality.

The medical staff of the asylums selected their own patients for
inclusion in the ‘euthanasia action’. They, too, were ‘working
towards the Fithrer’, whether or not this was their overt motivation.
Patients included had their names marked with a red cross. Those to
be spared had a blue ‘minus’ sign against their names. The killing,
mostly by carbon monoxide gas administered by doctors under no
compulsion to participate, was carried out in selected asylums, the

most notorious of which were Grafeneck, Hadamar, Bernburg,
Brandenburg, Hartheim, and Sonnenstein.

Alongside the T4 ‘action’, the Gauleiter of Pomerania, Franz
Schwede-Coburg, rapidly alerted to the new possibilities, worked
closely with the SS in October 1939 to ‘clear’ the asylums near the
coastal towns of Stralsund, Swinemtnde, and Stettin to make space
for ethnic Germans from the Baltic region (and for an SS barracks at
Stralsund). Patients were removed from the asylums, transported to
Neustadt, not far from Danzig, and shot by squads of SS men.
Gauleiter Erich Koch was quick to follow suit, arranging to pay for
the costs of ‘evacuating’ 1,558 patients from asylums in his Gau of
East Prussia, liquidated by an SS squad provided by Wilhelm Koppe,
newly-appointed Police Chief in Reichsgau Posen. This was the
‘Sonderkommando Lange’, which was soon put to use deploying
prototype mobile gas-vans to kill the mentally sick in this part of
annexed Poland. By mid-1940, these regional ‘actions’ had claimed
the lives of an estimated 10,000 victims.

By the time ‘Aktion-T4 was halted — as secretly as it had begun —
in August 1941, the target-figure laid down by the doctors in the
late summer had been surpassed. In the T4 ‘action’ alone by this
date, between 70,000 and 90,000 patients are reckoned to have
fallen victim to Hitler’s ‘euthanasia programme’. Since the killings
were neither confined to the T4 ‘action’, nor ended with the halt to
that ‘action’ in 1941, the total number of victims of Nazism’s drive
to liquidate the mentally ill may have been close on double that
number.

Was there the will to halt the already advanced rupture of
civilization and descent into modern barbarism that had so swiftly
broken new ground since the start of the war? And even if there
were the will, could anything be done?

Given Hitler’s outright dominance and unassailable position
within the regime, significant change could by this time, autumn

1939, be brought about only through his deposition or assassination.
This basic truth had been finally grasped the previous summer,
during the Sudeten crisis, by those individuals in high-ranking
places in the military, Foreign Ministry, and elsewhere close to the
levers of power who had tentatively felt their way towards radical
opposition to the regime. For long, even some of these individuals
had tended to exempt Hitler from the criticism they levelled at
others, especially Himmler, Heydrich, and the Gestapo. But by now
they were aware that without change at the very top, there would
be no change at all. This realization started to forge tighter links
between the disparate individuals and groups concerned. Colonel
Hans Oster, Chief of Staff at the Abwehr, backed by his boss, the
enigmatic Admiral Canaris, was the driving-force in making the
Abwehr the centre of an oppositional network, building on the
contacts made and relationships forged the previous summer. Oster
placed his most trusted associate, implacably opposed to Hitler,
Lieutenant-Colonel Helmuth Groscurth, as liaison with Chief of Staff
Halder at the headquarters of the Army High Command in Zossen,
just south of Berlin. He encouraged Weizsacker to appoint, as the
Foreign Office’s liaison at army headquarters, another opponent of
the regime, Rittmeister (Cavalry Major) Hasso von Etzdorf. This
was probably done on the initiative of Erich Kordt, head of the
Ministerial Bureau who continued, under Weizsacker’s protection, to
make the Foreign Office a further centre of oppositional contacts,
placing sympathizers (including his brother, Theo) in embassies
abroad. Oster also appointed to his own staff an individual who
would play an energetic role in extending and deepening
oppositional contacts while officially gathering foreign intelligence:
the able and well-connected lawyer Hans Dohnanyi, for some years
a close associate of Reich Justice Minister Gtirtner, and who had
helped clear former Commander-in-Chief of the Army Fritsch of the
trumped-up charges of homosexual relations that had been laid
against him. Dohnanyi would regularly drive Oster during autumn
1939 — dismal weeks for those opposed to Hitler — to see the man
whom practically all who hoped to see an early end to the Nazi
regime regarded as the patron of the oppositional groups, former

Chief of the General Staff, Ludwig Beck. Gradually, something
beginning to resemble a fundamental, conspiratorial resistance
movement among, necessarily, existing or former ‘servants’ of the
regime was in the process of emerging. The dilemma for those
individuals, mostly national-conservative in inclination, patriots all,
in contemplating the unseating of the head of state was great, and
even more acute now that Germany was at war.

The autumn of 1939 would provide a crucial testing-time for the
national-conservative resistance. In the end, they would resign
themselves to failure. At the centre of their concern was not in the
first instance the bestiality in Poland (though the detailed reports of
the abominations there certainly served to cement oppositional
feeling and the sense of urgency, both for moral reasons and out of
a sense of national shame, at the need to be rid of Hitler and his
henchmen who were responsible for such criminal acts). Nor was it
the ‘euthanasia action’. Of the mass murder in the asylums they had
not for months any real inkling. At any rate, it was not voiced as a
matter of prime concern. The key issue for them, as it had been for
two years or so, was the certainty that Hitler was leading Germany
to catastrophe through engaging in war with the Western powers.
Preventing a calamitous attack on France and Britain, and ending
the war, was vital. This issue came to a head in the autumn of 1939,
when Hitler was determined to press on with an early attack on the
West. But even before he pulled back — because of poor weather
conditions — from such a risky venture in the autumn and winter,
then went on the following spring to gain unimaginable military
successes in the western campaign, the fragility, weakness, and
divisions of the nascent resistance had been fully laid bare. No
attempt to remove Hitler had been made.

Hitler could by late 1939 be brought down in only one of two
ways: a coup d’état from above, meaning a strike from within the
regime’s leadership from those with access to power and military
might; or, something which the Dictator never ruled out, an
assassination attempt from below, by a maverick individual
operating entirely alone, outside any of the known -— by now tiny,

fragmented, and utterly powerless — left-wing underground
resistance groups which could so easily be infiltrated by the
Gestapo. While generals and leading civil servants pondered
whether they might act, but lacked the will and determination to do
so, one man with no access to the corridors of power, no political
links, and no hard-and-fast ideology, a Swabian joiner by the name
of Georg Elser, did act. In early November 1939 Elser would come
closer to destroying Hitler than anyone until July 1944. Only luck
would save the Dictator on this occasion. And Elser’s motives, built
on the naivety of elemental feeling rather than arising from the
tortured consciences of the better-read and more knowledgeable,
would mirror not the interests of those in high places but, without
doubt, concerns of countless ordinary Germans at the time. We will
return to them shortly.

For Hitler, the swift and comprehensive demolition of Poland did
not signal a victory to sit upon and await developments. Certainly,
he hoped that the West, having now witnessed the might of the
Wehrmacht in action, would — from his point of view — see sense,
and come to terms with Germany. The peace feelers that he put out
in September and October were couched in this vein. As Weizsacker
— reckoning the chances of peace to be no higher than 20 per cent —
put it early in October, summarizing what he understood as Hitler’s
desired outcome, in the somewhat unlikely event that London might
agree to a settlement at the expense of Poland, Germany ‘would be
spared the awkward decision on how England could be militarily
forced down’. As it was, Hitler, though his overtures were serious
enough, had few expectations that Britain would show interest in a
settlement, particularly once the British cabinet had announced that
it was preparing for a war that would last at least three years. He
was sure that the western powers would try to hold out as long as
possible, until their armaments programmes were complete. That
would mark a danger-point for Germany. Though — a view not
shared by his generals — he held the French military in some
contempt, he had a high esteem of British resilience and fighting-
power. And behind the British, there was always the threat (which

at this time he did not rate highly) that in due course the Americans
would intervene. So there was no time to lose. On the very day
after his return to Berlin, with the shells still raining down on
Warsaw, Hitler told his military leaders to prepare for an attack on
the West that very autumn.

‘Militarily,’ he declared, ‘time, especially in the psychological and
material sense, works against us.’ It was, therefore, ‘essential that
immediate plans for an attack against France be prepared’. The
rainy season would arrive within a few weeks. The air-force would
be better in spring. ‘But we cannot wait,’ he insisted. If a settlement
with Chamberlain were not possible, he would ‘smash the enemy
until he collapses’. The defeat of France, it was plainly inferred,
would force Britain to terms. The goal was ‘to bring England to its
knees; to destroy France’. His favoured time for carrying out the
attack was the end of October. The Commanders-in-Chief — even
Goring — were taken aback. But none protested. Hitler casually
threw his notes into the fire when he had finished speaking.

Two days later, Hitler told Rosenberg that he would propose a
major peace conference (together with an armistice and
demobilization) to regulate all matters rationally. Rosenberg asked
whether he intended to prosecute the war in the West. ‘Naturally,’
replied Hitler. The Maginot Line, Rosenberg recorded him saying,
was no longer a deterrent. If the English did not want peace, he
would attack them with all means available ‘and annihilate them’ —
again, his favourite phrase.

Hitler’s speech to the Reichstag on 6 October indeed held out, as
he had indicated to Rosenberg, the prospect of a conference of the
leading nations to settle Europe’s problems of peace and security.
But a starting-point was that the division of Poland between
Germany and the Soviet Union was to remain. There would be no
recreation of the Poland of the Versailles settlement. It would be
peace on Hitler’s terms, with no concessions on what he had won.
He painted a lurid picture of death and destruction if the western
powers should decline his ‘offer’. He blamed the warmongering on
‘a certain Jewish-international capitalism and journalism’, implying

in particular Churchill and his supporters. If Churchill’s view should
prevail, he concluded, then Germany would fight. Riding one of his
main hobby-horses, he added: ‘A November 1918 will never be
repeated in German history.’ The speech amounted to an olive-
branch clenched in a mailed fist.

Hitler’s ‘offer’ was dismissed by Chamberlain in a speech in the
House of Commons six days later. It was what Hitler had expected.
He had not waited. On the very day of his Reichstag speech, he
stressed to Brauchitsch and Halder that a decisive move in the
north-west was necessary to prevent a French advance that autumn
through Belgium, threatening the Ruhr. Two days later Brauchitsch
was informed that Hitler had provisionally set 25 November as the
date of attack. On 9 October, Hitler completed a lengthy
memorandum that he had worked on for two nights, outlining and
justifying his plans for an attack on the West. He had specifically
prepared it because of his awareness of opposition to the idea in the
army leadership. Again, he emphasized that time was of the
essence. The attack could not begin soon enough. The aim was the
complete military defeat of the western powers. He read out the
memorandum at a meeting with his military leaders on 10 October.
Its contents were embodied in ‘Directive No.6 for the Conduct of
War’ issued later that day (though dated 9 October), stating Hitler’s
determination ‘without letting much time pass by’ to take offensive
action.

When Hitler heard on 12 October of Chamberlain’s rejection of
his ‘peace offer’, he lost no time in announcing, even without
waiting for the full text of Chamberlain’s speech, that Britain had
spurned the hand of peace and that, consequently, the war
continued. On 16 October Hitler told Brauchitsch he had given up
hope of coming to an agreement with the West. ‘The British,’ he
said, ‘will be ready to talk only after defeats. We must get at them
as quickly as possible.’ He reckoned with a date between 15 and 20
November. Within a matter of days, Hitler had brought this date
forward and now fixed ‘Case Yellow’, as the attack on the West had
been code-named, for 12 November.

Speaking to his generals, Hitler confined himself largely to
military objectives. To his trusted circle, and to party leaders, he
was more expressive. Goebbels found him high in confidence on 11
October. Germany’s defeat in the last war, he stated, was solely
attributable to treachery. This time traitors would not be spared. He
responded to Chamberlain’s dismissal of his ‘peace offer’ by stating
that he was glad that he could now ‘go for England’. He had given
up almost all hope of peace. ‘The English will have to learn the hard
way,’ he stated.

He was in similar mood when he addressed the Reichs- and
Gauleiter in a two-hour speech on 21 October. He reckoned war
with the West was unavoidable. There was no other choice. But at
its end would be ‘the great and all-embracing German people’s
Reich’. He would, Hitler told his party leaders, unleash his major
assault on the West — and on England itself — within a fortnight or
so. He would use all methods available, including attacks on cities.
After defeating England and France he would again turn to the East.
Then — an allusion to the Holy Roman Empire of the Middle Ages —
he would create a Germany as of old, incorporating Belgium and
Switzerland. Hitler was evidently still thinking along such lines
when he told Goebbels a few days later he had earmarked Burgundy
for the resettlement of the South Tyroleans. ‘He’s already
distributing French provinces,’ noted the Propaganda Minister. ‘He
hurries far ahead of all steps of development. Just like every
genius.’

On 6 November Goebbels was again listening to Hitler’s views on
the war. ‘The strike against the western powers will not have to
wait much longer,’ he recorded. ‘Perhaps,’ added Goebbels, ‘the
Fuhrer will succeed sooner than we all think in annulling the Peace
of Westphalia. With that his historic life will be crowned.’ Goebbels
thought the decision to go ahead was imminent.

All the signs are that the pressure for an early strike against the
West came directly from Hitler, without initiation or prompting
from other quarters. That it received the support of Goebbels and
the party leadership was axiomatic. Within the military, it was a

different matter. Hitler could reckon with the backing -— or at least
lack of objection — of Raeder, Commander-in-Chief of the Navy. And
whatever his private anxieties, Goring would never deviate in
public from Hitler’s line. But, as Hitler recognized, the decision to
attack the West already in the autumn set him once more on a
collision course with the army leadership, spearheaded by
Brauchitsch and Halder. On 14 October, primed by Weizsacker
about Hitler’s reaction to Chamberlain’s speech rejecting his ‘peace
offer’, the head of the army and his Chief of Staff met to discuss the
consequences. Halder noted three possibilities: attack, wait,
‘fundamental changes’. None offered prospects of decisive success,
least of all the last one ‘since it is essentially negative and tends to
render us vulnerable’. The qualifying remarks were made by
Brauchitsch. The weak, ultra-cautious, and tradition-bound
Commander-in-Chief of the Army could not look beyond
conventional attempts to dissuade Hitler from what he thought was
a disastrous course of action. But he was evidently responding to a
suggestion floated by Halder, following his discussions with
Weizsacker the previous day, to have Hitler arrested at the moment
of the order for attack on the West. The cryptic third possibility
signified then no less than the extraordinary fact that in the early
stages of a major war the two highest representatives of the army
were airing the possibility of a form of coup d’état involving the
removal of Hitler as head of state.

The differences between the two army leaders were nonetheless
wide. And nothing flowed from the discussion in the direction of an
embryonic plan to unseat Hitler. Brauchitsch attempted, within the
bounds of orthodoxy, to have favoured generals such as Reichenau
and Rundstedt try to influence Hitler to change his mind — a fruitless
enterprise. Halder went further. By early November he was, if
anything, still more convinced that direct action against Hitler was
necessary to prevent the imminent catastrophe. In this, his views
were coming to correspond with the small numbers of radical
opponents of the regime in the Foreign Ministry and in the Abwehr
who were now actively contemplating measures to remove Hitler.

In the last weeks of October various notions of deposing Hitler -
often unrealistic or scarcely thought through — were furtively
pondered by the tiny, disparate, only loosely connected,
oppositional groups. Goerdeler and his main contacts — Hassell (the
former Ambassador to Rome), Beck, and Johannes Popitz (former
State Secretary in the Reich Finance Ministry) — were one such
cluster, weighing up for a time whether a transitional government
headed by Goring (whose reluctance to engage in war with Britain
was known to them) might be an option. This cluster, through Beck,
forged loose links with the group based in the Abwehr — Oster,
Dohnanyi, Hans-Bernd Gisevius (one-time Gestapo officer but by
now radically opposed to Hitler), and Groscurth. The latter
grouping worked out a plan of action for a coup, involving the
arrest of Hitler (perhaps declaring him mentally ill), along with
Himmler, Heydrich, Ribbentrop, Goring, Goebbels, and other
leading Nazis. Encouraged by their chief, Admiral Canaris, and
driven on by Oster, the Abwehr group attempted, though with little
success, to gain backing for their ideas from selected officers at
General Staff headquarters in Zossen. Their ambivalence about
Halder meant that they did not approach him directly. Moreover,
they knew nothing of the thoughts he had aired to Brauchitsch on
14 October. A third set of individuals sharing the view that Hitler
had to be removed and war with the West prevented centred on
Weizsacker in the Foreign Ministry, and was chiefly represented by
Erich Kordt, who was able to utilize his position as head of
Ribbentrop’s Ministerial Bureau to foster contacts at home and
abroad. As we noted, this grouping had contact to the Abwehr
group and to known sympathizers in the General Staff — mainly staff
officers, though at this point not Halder himself — through
Weizsacker’s army liaison, Legation Secretary Hasso von Etzdorf.

Halder himself (and his most immediate friend and subordinate
General Otto von Sttilpnagel) came round to the idea of a putsch by
the end of the month, after Hitler had confirmed his intention of a
strike on 12 November. Halder sent Stiilpnagel to take surreptitious
soundings among selected generals about their likely response to a

coup. The findings were not encouraging. While army-group
commanders such as Bock and Rundstedt were opposed to an
offensive against the West, they rejected the idea of a putsch, partly
on the grounds that they were themselves unsure whether they
would retain the backing of their subordinate officers. In addition,
Halder established to his own satisfaction, based on a ‘sample’ of
public opinion drawn from the father of his chauffeur and a few
others, that the German people supported Hitler and were not ready
for a putsch. Halder’s hesitancy reflected his own deep uncertainty
about the moral as well as security aspect of a strike against the
head of state and supreme commander of the armed forces. Others
took a bolder stance. But, though loosely bonded through parallel
thoughts of getting rid of Hitler, the different oppositional clusters
had no coherent, unified, and agreed plan for action. Nor, while
now accepting Halder’s readiness to act, was there full confidence in
the determination of the Chief of Staff, on whom practically
everything depended, to see it through.

This was the position around noon on 5 November when
Brauchitsch nervously made his way through the corridors of the
Reich Chancellery to confront Hitler directly about the decision to
attack the West. If the attack were to go ahead on schedule on 12
November, the order to make operational preparations had to be
confirmed to the Commander-in-Chief of the Army by 1 p.m. on the
5th. Among the oppositional groups, the hope was that Brauchitsch
could finally be persuaded to go along with a putsch if Hitler, as
was to be expected, held firm to his decision for an attack.
Halderwaited in the ante-room while Brauchitsch and Hitler
conferred together. Keitel joined them some while later. The
meeting was a fiasco. It lasted no longer than twenty minutes.
Brauchitsch hesitantly began to tell Hitler that preparations were
not sufficiently advanced for an offensive against the West which,
therefore, had every chance of proving catastrophic. He went on to
back up his argument by pointing out that the infantry had shown
morale and technical weaknesses in the attack on Poland, and that
the discipline of officers and men had often been lacking. The Front

showed similar symptoms to those of 1917-18, he claimed. This was
a bad mistake by Brauchitsch. It diverted from the main issue, and,
as Brauchitsch could have anticipated, it provoked Hitler into a
furious outburst. He wanted concrete evidence, he fumed, and
demanded to know how many death-sentences had been carried out.
He did not believe Brauchitsch, and would fly the next night to the
front to see for himself. Then he dismissed Brauchitsch’s main point.
The army was unprepared, he asserted, because it did not want to
fight. The weather would still be bad in the spring — and
furthermore bad for the enemy too. He knew the ‘spirit of Zossen’,
he raged, and would destroy it. Almost shaking with anger, Hitler
marched out of the room, slamming the door, leaving the head of
the army speechless, trembling, face as white as chalk, and broken.

‘Any sober discussion of these things is impossible with him,’
Halder commented, in something of an understatement. But for
Halder the impact of the meeting went further. Talk of destroying
the ‘spirit of Zossen’ suggested to the Chief of Staff that Hitler knew
of the plot to unseat him. The Gestapo could turn up in Zossen any
time. Halder returned in panic to his headquarters and ordered the
destruction of all papers relating to the conspiracy. Next day he told
Groscurth that the attack in the west would be carried out. There
was nothing to be done. ‘Very depressing impression,’ recorded
Groscurth.

Hitler had given the order for the offensive at 1.30 p.m. on 5
November, soon after his interview with Brauchitsch. Two days
later the attack was postponed because of poor weather. But the
chance to strike against Hitler had been lost. The circumstances
would not be as favourable for several years. The order for the
attack, meant to be the moment to undertake the proposed coup,
had come and gone. Brauchitsch, badly shaken by his audience with
Hitler, had indicated that he would do nothing, though would not
try to hinder a putsch. Canaris, approached by Halder, was
disgusted at the suggestion that he should instigate Hitler’s
assassination. Other than this suggestion that someone else might
take over responsibility for the dirty work, Halder now did little.

The moment had passed. He gradually pulled back from the
opposition’s plans. In the end, he lacked the will, determination,
and courage to act. The Abwehr group did not give up. But they
acknowledged diminishing prospects of success. Oster’s soundings
with Generals Witzleben, Leeb, Bock, and Rundstedt produced
mixed results. The truth was that the army was divided. Some
generals opposed Hitler. But there were more who backed him. And
below the high command, there were junior officers, let alone the
rank-and-file, whose reactions to any attempt to stop Hitler dead in
his tracks were uncertain. Throughout the conflict with the army
leadership, Hitler continued to hold the whip-hand. And he had not
yielded in the slightest. Despite repeated postponements because of
bad weather — twenty-nine in all — he had not cancelled his offensive
against the West. Divisions, distrust, fragmentation, but above all a
lack of resolve had prevented the oppositional groups — especially
the key figures in the military — from acting.

The plotters in the Abwehr, Foreign Ministry, and General Staff
headquarters were as astonished as all other Germans when they
heard of an attack on Hitler’s life that had taken place in the
Burgerbraukeller on the evening of 8 November 1939. They thought
it might have come from someone within their own ranks, or been
carried out by dissident Nazis, or some other set of opponents —
Communists, clerics, or ‘reactionaries’ — and that Hitler had been
tipped off in time. In fact, Hitler, sitting in the compartment of his
special train and discussing with Goebbels how the showdown with
the clergy would have to await the end of the war, was wholly
unaware of what had happened until his journey to Berlin was
interrupted at Nuremberg with the news. His first reaction was that
the report must be wrong. According to Goebbels, he thought it was
a ‘hoax’. The official version was soon put out that the British Secret
Service was behind the assassination attempt, and that the
perpetrator was ‘a creature’ of Otto Strasser. The capture next day
of the British agents Major R. H. Stevens and Captain S. Payne Best
on the Dutch border was used by propaganda to underpin this far-
fetched interpretation.

The truth was less elaborate — but all the more stunning. The
attempt had been carried out by a single person, an ordinary
German, a man from the working class, acting without the help or
knowledge of anyone else. Where generals had hesitated, he had
tried to blow up Hitler to save Germany and Europe from even
greater disaster.

His name was Georg Elser. He was a joiner from Konigsbronn in
Wiirttemberg, thirty-six years old, a loner with few friends. Before
1933 he had supported the KPD in elections, but because in his view
it stood for improving the lot of the working classes, not on account
of an ideological programme. After 1933 he said he had observed
the deterioration in the living-standard of the working class, and
restrictions on its freedom. He noticed the anger among workers at
the regime. He took part in discussions with workmates about poor
conditions, and shared their views. He also shared their anxieties
about the coming war which they all expected in the autumn of
1938. After the Munich Agreement he remained convinced, he said,
‘that Germany would make further demands of other countries and
annex other countries and that therefore a war would be
unavoidable’. Prompted by no one, he began to be obsessed by
ways of improving the condition of workers and preventing war. He
concluded that only the ‘elimination’ of the regime’s leadership — by
which he meant Hitler, Goring, and Goebbels — would bring this
about. The idea would not leave him. In autumn 1938 he decided
that he himself would see it was done.

He read in the newspapers that the next gathering of party
leaders would be in the Btirgerbraukeller in early November and
travelled to Munich to assess the possibilities for what he had in
mind. The security problems were not great. (Security for the
events was left to the party, not to the police.) He worked out that
the best method would be to place a time-bomb in the pillar behind
the dais where Hitler would stand. During the next months he stole
explosives from the armaments factory where he was currently
working, and designed the mechanism for his time-bomb. At the
beginning of August he returned to Munich. Between then and early

November he hid over thirty times during the night in the
Burgerbraukeller, working on hollowing out a cavity in the selected
pillar and leaving by a side-door early next morning. The bomb was
in place, and set, by 6 November. Elser was leaving nothing to
chance. He returned on the night of 7 November to make sure it
was functioning properly. He pressed his ear to the side of the
pillar, and heard the ticking. Nothing had gone wrong. Next
morning he left Munich for Konstanz, en route — as he thought — to
Switzerland, and safety.

That evening, as always on 8 November, the ‘Old Guard’ of the
party assembled. Hitler’s annual address usually lasted from about
8.30 p.m. until about ten o’clock. It had already been announced
that, in the circumstances of the war, this year’s meeting would
begin earlier and that the two-day commemoration of the putsch
would be shortened. Hitler began his speech soon after his arrival in
the Burgerbraukeller, at 8.10 p.m., and finished at 9.07 p.m.
Escorted by a good number of party big-wigs, he left immediately
for the station to take the 9.31 p.m. train back to Berlin.

At twenty past nine the pillar immediately behind the dais where
Hitler had stood minutes earlier, and part of the roof directly above,
were ripped apart by Elser’s bomb. Eight persons were killed in the
blast, a further sixty-three injured, sixteen of them seriously. Hitler
had been gone no more than ten minutes when the bomb went off.

He attributed his salvation to the work of ‘Providence’ — a sign
that he was to fulfil the task destiny had laid out for him. In its
headline on 10 November, the Volkischer Beobachter called it ‘the
miraculous salvation of the Fuhrer’. There was, in fact, nothing
providential or miraculous about it. It was pure luck. Hitler’s
reasons for returning without delay to Berlin were genuine enough.
The decision to attack the West had been temporarily postponed on
7 November, with a final decision set for the 9th. Hitler had to be
back in the Reich Chancellery by then. It was more important than
reminiscing about old times with party stalwarts in the
Burgerbraukeller. Elser could have known nothing about the
reasons for the curtailment of Hitler’s quick trip to Munich. It was

mere chance that the Swabian joiner did not succeed where the
generals had failed even to mount an attempt.

Elser himself was already under arrest at the customs post near
Konstanz when the bomb went off. He had been picked up trying to
cross the Swiss border illegally. It seemed a routine arrest. Only
some hours after the explosion did the border officials begin to
realize that the contents of Georg Elser’s pockets, including a
postcard of the Burgerbraukeller, linked him with the assassination
attempt on Hitler. On 14 November, Elser confessed. A few days
later he gave a full account of his actions, and the motives behind
them. He was interned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp, and
treated, remarkably, as a privileged prisoner. Probably Hitler, who
continued to believe that Elser was the front-man of an
international conspiracy, intended a post-war show-trial to
incriminate the British Secret Service. At the end of 1944 or in early
1945 Elser was brought to Dachau. There was to be no show-trial.
With the war as good as lost, Elser had no more value to the
regime. Shortly before the Americans liberated Dachau, he was
taken out and killed.

In his anxieties about the war, Elser spoke for many. He was on
far less sure ground with his attribution of blame for the war to the
Nazi leadership. The signs are that propaganda had been successful
in persuading most ordinary Germans that the western powers were
to blame for the prolongation of a war which Hitler had done all he
could to avoid. Whatever criticisms — and they were many and
bitter — that people had of the party and the regime, Hitler still
retained his massive popularity. Few would have applauded a
successful assassination attempt. Vast numbers would have been
appalled. The chances of a backlash, and a new ‘stab-in-the-back’
legend, would have been great. People were saying that if the
attempt had been successful it would have resulted in internal
confusion, benefit to Germany’s enemies, loss of the war, worse
misery than was caused by Versailles, and the upturning of
everything achieved since 1933.

Hitler’s hold over Germany was as strong as ever. The failure of
those in positions of power to move against him and the
repercussions of Elser’s bomb-attack demonstrated that his authority
was unchallengeable from within the regime’s élites and that he was
still immensely popular with the masses. He played on this latter
point when he addressed a gathering of around 200 commanding
generals and other senior Wehrmacht officers in the Reich
Chancellery at noon on 23 November.

Hitler’s speech was remarkable for its frankness. In the light of
the conflict with the army leadership in the previous weeks, its aim
was to convince the generals of the need to attack the West without
delay. After his usual tour d’horizon he reached the characteristic
conclusion: ‘Everything is determined by the fact that the moment is
favourable now; in six months it might not be so any more.’ He
turned to his own role. ‘As the last factor I must in all modesty
describe my own person: irreplaceable. Neither a military man nor a
civilian could replace me ... I shall strike and not capitulate. The
fate of the Reich depends only on me.’ Internal conditions also
favoured an early strike, he went on. Revolution from within was
impossible. And behind the army stood the strongest armaments
industry in the world. Hitler said he was now gambling all he had
achieved on victory. At stake was who was to dominate Europe in
the future. His decision was unalterable, Hitler went on. ‘I shall
attack France and England at the most favourable and earliest
moment. Breach of the neutrality of Belgium and Holland is of no
importance. No one will question that when we have won ...’ His
final point was the psychological readiness of the German people.
With an eye on the possible deterioration of the backing he had
from the German people, he now told the military: ‘I want to
annihilate the enemy. Behind me stands the German people, whose
morale can only grow worse.’

Hitler had been right in his speech: no revolution could be
expected from within. Heydrich’s police-state ruled that out. But it
was not only a matter of repression. Alongside the ruthlessness of
the regime towards internal opponents stood the widespread basic

consensus reaching across most of society behind much of what the
regime had undertaken and, in particular, what were taken to be
the remarkable achievements of Hitler himself. Elser’s bomb had
merely brought a renewed demonstration of his popularity.
Meanwhile, the internal opposition was resigned to being unable to
act. The navy and Luftwaffe were behind Hitler. The army
leadership would, whatever its reservations, fulfil its duty. The
division of the generals, coupled with their pronounced sense of
duty even when they held a course of action to be disastrous, was
Hitler’s strength.

Nothing could stop the western offensive. Hitler was by now
obsessed with ‘beating England’. It was purely a matter of when,
not if, the attack on the West would take place. After further short-
term postponements, on 16 January 1940 Hitler finally put it off
until the spring.

The war was set to continue, and to widen. Also set to escalate
was the barbarism that was an intrinsic part of it. At home the
killings in the asylums were mounting into a full-scale programme
of mass murder. In Poland, the grandiose resettlement schemes
presided over by Himmler and Heydrich were seeing the brutal
uprooting and deportation of tens of thousands of Poles and Jews
into the ‘dumping-ground’ of the General Government. Not least,
the centre-point of the ‘racial cleansing’ mania, the ‘removal’ of the
Jews, was farther from solution than ever now that over 2 million
Polish Jews had fallen into the hands of the Nazis. In December
Goebbels reported to Hitler on his recent visit to Poland. The
Fuhrer, he recorded, listened carefully to his account and agreed
with his views on the ‘Jewish and Polish question’. ‘The Jewish
danger must be banished from us. But in a few generations it will
reappear. There’s no panacea.’

Evidently, no ‘complete solution’ to the ‘Jewish problem’ was yet
in sight. The constant quest to find such a ‘panacea’ by Nazi
underlings working directly or indirectly ‘towards the Fuhrer’ would
nevertheless ensure that, in the conquered and subjugated

territories of the east, a ‘solution’ would gradually begin to emerge
before long.

18
Zenith of Power

Hitler had placed the Reich in a quandary. The war could not be
ended. That was now a decision out of Germany’s control, unless
Britain could be forced to the conference table or militarily
defeated. But neither militarily, as the chiefs of the armed forces
made plain, nor economically, as every indicator demonstrated, was
Germany equipped at this stage to fight the long war with which, it
was known, the British were already reckoning. The Wehrmacht
had entered into hostilities in autumn 1939 with no well-laid plans
for a major war, and no strategy at all for an offensive in the West.
Nothing at all had been clearly thought through. The Luftwaffe was
the best equipped of the three branches of the armed forces. But
even here, the armaments programme had been targeted at 1942,
not 1939. The navy’s operational planning was based upon a fleet
that could not be ready before 1943. In fact, the 1939 Z-Plan —
halted at the start of the war — would leave Germany with severe
limitations at sea until 1946. And within the confines of that plan,
the building of U-boats necessary for an economic blockade of
Britain was deliberately neglected by Hitler in favour of the
interests of the army. However, the army itself lacked even
sufficient munitions following the brief Polish campaign (in which
some 50 per cent of the tanks and motorized units deployed were
no longer serviceable) to contemplate an immediate continuation of
the war in the West.

Hitler had to gamble everything on the defeat of France. If
Britain could be kept from gaining a foothold on the Continent until
this were achieved, Hitler was certain that the British would have to

sue for peace. Getting Britain out of the war through isolation after
a German defeat of France was Hitler’s only overall war-strategy as
the abnormally icy winter of 1940 gradually gave way to spring.
Ranged against Germany at some point, Hitler was aware, would be
the might of the USA. Currently still dominated by isolationism, and
likely to be preoccupied by the forthcoming presidential elections in
the autumn, early involvement in a European conflict could be
discounted. But as long as Britain stayed in the war, the
participation — at the very least through benevolent neutrality — of
the USA, with its immense economic power, could not be ruled out.
And that was a factor that was out of Germany’s reach. It was all
the more reason, objectively as well as simply in Hitler’s manic
obsession with time, to eliminate Britain from the war without
delay.

The East was at this point at the back of Hitler’s mind — though
not out of it. In his memorandum the previous October he had
already remarked that Soviet neutrality could be reckoned with at
present, but that no treaty or agreement could guarantee it in the
future. ‘In eight months, a year, let alone a few years this could all
be different,’ he had said. ‘If all treaties concluded were held to,’ he
told Goebbels, ‘mankind would no longer exist today.’ Hitler
presumed that the Russians would break the non-aggression pact
when it suited them to do so. For the time being they were
militarily weak — a condition enhanced by Stalin’s inexplicable
purges; they were preoccupied with their own affairs in the Baltic,
especially the troublesome Finnishwar; and they posed, therefore,
no danger from the East. They could be dealt with at a later stage.
Their current disposition provided still further evidence for Hitler
that his attack on the West, and the elimination of Britain from the
war, could not wait.

It became clear in early 1940 that, before the western offensive
could be launched, it was imperative to secure control over
Scandinavia and the northern sea passages. A key consideration was
the safeguarding of supplies of Swedish iron-ore, vital for the
German war-economy, which were mainly shipped through the port

of Narvik in the north of Norway. Hitler had acknowledged to
Raeder as early as 1934 how essential it would be for the navy to
guarantee the iron-ore imports in the event of war. But he had
shown no actual strategic interest in Scandinavia until the first
months of 1940. Alongside the need to secure the supplies of ore
went, in Hitler’s mind, the aim of keeping Britain off the European
continent. The navy itself had developed no operational plans for
Scandinavia before the outbreak of war. But as the prospect of war
with Britain began to take concrete shape in the later 1930s, naval
planners started to weigh up the need for bases on the Norwegian
coast.

Once war had started, the navy leadership, not Hitler, took the
initiative in pressing for the occupation of Denmark and Norway. In
October, and again in early December 1939, Raeder, elevated the
previous April to the rank of Grand-Admiral, stressed to Hitler the
importance to the war-economy of occupying Norway. Increasingly
worried by the possibility of being pre-empted by British occupation
(under the pretext of assisting the Finns in the war against the
Soviet Union), Raeder continued to lobby Hitler for early action.
Hitler became seriously alerted to the danger of Allied intervention
in Norway after the Altmark, carrying around 300 Allied merchant
seamen captured in the south Atlantic, had been raided on 16
February in Norwegian waters by a boarding-party from the British
destroyer Cossack, and the prisoners freed. Now the matter became
urgent for him. On 1 March Hitler put out the directive for
‘Wesertibung’ (‘Weser Exercise’). Two days later, he underlined the
urgency of action in Norway. He wanted an acceleration of
preparations, and ordered ‘Weser Exercise’ to be carried out a few
days before the western offensive. As fears of a British occupation
mounted throughout March, Raeder finally persuaded Hitler,
towards the end of the month, to agree to set a precise date for the
operation. When he spoke to his commanders on 1 April, Hitler
closely followed Raeder’s lines of argument. The next day, the date
for the operation was fixed as 9 April. Within forty-eight hours it
was learnt that British action was imminent. On 8 April British

warships mined the waters around Narvik. The race for Norway was
on.

The Allied mine-laying gave Germany the pretext it had been
waiting for. Hitler called Goebbels, and explained to him what was
afoot while they walked alone in the grounds of the Reich
Chancellery in the lovely spring sunshine. Everything was prepared.
No worthwhile resistance was to be expected. He was uninterested
in America’s reaction. Material assistance from the USA would not
be forthcoming for eight months or so, manpower not for about one
and a half years. ‘And we must come to victory in this year.
Otherwise the material supremacy of the opposing side would be
too great. Also, a long war would be psychologically difficult to
bear,’ Hitler conceded. He gave Goebbels an insight into his aims
for the conquest of the north. ‘First we will keep quiet for a short
time once we have both countries’ - Denmark and Norway -— ‘and
then England will be plastered. Now we possess a basis for attack.’
He was prepared to leave the Kings of Denmark and Norway
untouched, as long as they did not create trouble. ‘But we will never
again give up both countries.’

Landings by air and sea took place in Denmark in the early
morning of 9 April. The Danes swiftly decided to offer no resistance.
The Norwegian operation went less smoothly. Narvik and
Trondheim were taken. But the sinking of the Bllicher, by a single
shell from an ancient coastal battery that landed in the ammunition
hold of the new cruiser as it passed through the narrows near
Oscarsborg, forced the accompanying ships to turn back and
delayed the occupation of Oslo for the few hours that allowed the
Norwegian royal family and government to leave the capital.
Despite sturdy resistance by the Norwegians and relatively high
naval losses at the hands of the British fleet, air superiority,
following the swift capture of the airfields, rapidly helped provide
the German forces with sufficient control to compel the evacuation
of the British, French, and Polish troops who had landed in central
Norway by the beginning of May. The Allies eventually took Narvik
later in the month, after a protracted struggle, only to be pulled out

again by Churchill in early June on account of the mounting danger
to Britain from the German offensive in the west. The last
Norwegian forces capitulated on the tenth.

‘Weser Exercise’ had proved a success. But it had been at a cost.
Much of the surface-fleet of the German navy had been put out of
action for the rest of 1940. Running the occupied parts of
Scandinavia from now on sucked in on a more or less permanent
basis around 300,000 men, many of them engaged in holding down
a Norwegian population bitterly resentful at a German
administration that was aided and abetted by Vidkun Quisling’s
collaborationist movement. And there was a further consequence
which would turn out to be to Germany’s disadvantage and have
major significance for the British war-effort. Indirectly, the British
failure led to the end of the Chamberlain government and brought
into power the person who would prove himself Hitler’s most
defiant and unrelenting foe: Winston Churchill.

The eventual success of ‘Weser Exercise’ concealed to all but the
armed forces’ leadership Hitler’s serious deficiencies as a military
commander. The lack of coordination between the branches of the
armed forces; the flawed communications between the OKW
(Oberkommando der Wehrmacht — High Command of the Armed
Forces) and the heads of the navy and, especially, army and
Luftwaffe (leading to the need for alterations to directives already
signed and issued); Hitler’s own reluctance, in larger briefing
meetings, to oppose either Raeder or Goring, though advocating a
tough line in private; and his constant interference in the minutiae
of operations control: all provided for serious complications in the
execution of ‘Weser Exercise’. On this occasion, the crisis soon
passed. Hitler could bask in the glory of another triumph. But when
the victories ran out, the flaws in his style of military leadership
would prove a lasting weakness.

For now, however, he could turn his full energies to the long-
awaited western offensive.

The repeated postponements of ‘Case Yellow’ (as the western
offensive had come to be called) provided not just the opportunity

to build up the army after the Polish campaign but also time to
rethink operational plans. In Poland, Hitler had kept out of
involvement in military operations. Now, in the preparation of the
western offensive, he intervened directly for the first time. It set the
pattern for the future. Already in the autumn he was uneasy about
the directives coming from the Army High Command. Some of the
top commanders were equally unconvinced. The plans seemed too
conventional. They were what the enemy would expect. Even after
modifications they remained less than satisfactory. They envisaged
the decisive thrust coming from the north, either side of Liége.
Hitler wanted something more daring, something which would
retain the crucial element of surprise. His own ideas were still
embryonic. They favoured a main line of attack further south —
though the Army High Command thought this too risky since it
involved attacking across the difficult wooded terrain of the
Ardennes, with obvious problems for tank operations. Hitler did not
know for some weeks that similar ideas were being more
thoroughly worked out by Lieutenant-General Erich von Manstein,
chief of staff of Army Group A. Manstein was among those generals
concerned at the unimaginative strategy of the Army High
Command. Discussions with Heinz Guderian, the general with
greatest expertise in tank warfare, led him to conclude that the
Ardennes posed no insuperable barrier to a panzer thrust. General
von Rundstedt, Manstein’s immediate superior, also supported the
bolder plan. However, Manstein was unable to persuade Army High
Command to adopt his plan. Brauchitsch was adamantly opposed to
any alteration to the established strategy and not even prepared to
discuss Manstein’s plan. Halder at least agreed to take all
operational proposals into account in a series of war games. These
eventually, by February, were to make him more amenable to the
Manstein plan. In January, however, Brauchitsch still refused to
take Manstein’s operational draft to Hitler, and had the persistent
general moved to a new command post in Stettin. Hitler had, even
so, been made aware of the basic lines of Manstein’s plan in the
second half of December. The postponement until spring of ‘Yellow’
that followed in January then gave him the opportunity to state that

he wanted to give the operation a new basis, and above all to
ensure absolute secrecy and the element of surprise.

In mid-February the operational plan for ‘Yellow’ was still not
definitively agreed. Hitler was said to have described the existing
planning of the Army High Command as the ‘ideas of a military
cadet’. But nothing had as yet taken their place. At this point,
Hitler’s Wehrmacht adjutant Rudolf Schmundt took the initiative
and arranged for a meeting with Manstein on 17 February. By this
time, Jodl had been informed that Hitler favoured a thrust of the
motorized units on the southern flank, towards Sedan, where the
enemy would least expect them. The army leadership, taking these
wishes of Hitler on board and also bearing in mind the outcome of
the war games, had already adjusted its strategic thinking when, on
18 February, Hitler spoke of the favourable impression he had
gained of Manstein’s plan the day before. The die was now cast. By
chance, the basic thoughts of the amateur had coincided with the
brilliantly unorthodox planning of the professional strategist.
Further refined by the OKH (Oberkommando des Heeres — High
Command of the Army), the Manstein plan gave Hitler what he
wanted: a surprise assault in the most unexpected area which,
though not without risk, had the boldness of genius. The famous
‘sickle cut’ — though the designation was not a contemporary one —
was incorporated in the new directive of 24 February. While the
Allied forces countered the expected German attack through
Belgium, armoured units of Army Group A would rapidly drive
through the Ardennes and into the lowlands of northern France
towards the coast, scything through Allied forces and pushing them
into the path of Army Group B, advancing from the north.

‘The Fuhrer presses for action as rapidly as possible,’ commented
Goebbels in mid-April. ‘We can’t and won’t wait for long.’ The
attack was finally set for 10 May. Hitler was confident. To those
who saw him at close quarters, he appeared calm and optimistic, as
if the doubts of previous months had passed, and he was now letting
events take their course. He thought that France would capitulate
after around six weeks, and that England would then pull out of a

war which, to continue, would mean losing its Empire — something
wholly unimaginable. The balance of military forces was roughly
even. What Hitler had not been fully informed about was the
critical state of Germany’s raw-material reserves: enough rubber for
six months, enough fuel for only four months. Booty from the
western campaign would prove crucial in securing the material base
for continuing the war.

The level of secrecy maintained even in Hitler’s closest entourage
in the days leading up to the offensive was profound. When his
special armoured train, code-named Amerika, pulled out of a small,
secluded station on the outskirts of Berlin on the evening of 9 May,
his press chief, Otto Dietrich, thought he was en route to visit
shipworks in Hamburg, and Hitler’s secretaries thought they were
setting out for Denmark and Norway to visit the troops. After
midnight, the train quietly switched in the vicinity of Hanover from
the northbound tracks and turned westward. Even then, the
destination was not disclosed. But by now there was no longer any
doubt of the purpose of the journey. Hitler was in excellent spirits
throughout. Dawn was breaking when they got down from the train
at a little station in the Eifel, near Euskirchen. Cars were waiting to
drive the company through hilly, woody countryside to their new
temporary home: the Fiihrer Headquarters near Munstereifel that
had been given the name Felsennest (Rock Eyrie). The
accommodation was cramped and simple. Apart from Hitler himself,
only Keitel, Schaub, and a manservant had rooms in the first
bunker. Jodl, Dr Brandt, Schmundt, Below, Puttkamer, and Keitel’s
adjutant were in a second. The rest had to be accommodated in the
nearby village. The woods around were filled with the springtime
twittering of birds. But as his staff gathered in front of Hitler’s
bunker the peaceful sounds of the countryside in spring were
broken by the distant rumble of shell-fire. Hitler pointed to the
west. ‘Gentlemen, the offensive against the western powers has just
started,’ he declared.

That offensive proceeded with a breathtaking pace that stunned the
world. Even Hitler and his military leaders scarcely dared hope for
such a scale of early successes. On the northern flank, the Dutch
surrender followed within five days, the Queen and government
fleeing to exile in England. Before that, the terror-bombing of
Rotterdam’s old town had brought death and devastation from the
skies. It was the trademark of the new type of warfare. Warsaw
civilians had suffered it first; the people of British cities would soon
come to dread it; and, later in the war, German citizens themselves
would be exposed to its full horror. Belgian neutrality, for the
second time in under thirty years, was breached along with that of
the Dutch. On 28 May the Belgian army would surrender
unconditionally, leaving King Leopold in effect a prisoner with the
government in exile. Meanwhile, the ‘sickle cut’ plan was proving a
brilliant and decisive success. Aided by the strategic and operational
ineptitude of the French military command, German armoured units
were able to sweep through the Ardennes, through Luxemburg and
southern Belgium into northern France, breaking the thin line of
French defence, and crossing the Meuse already on 13 May. Within
ten days of the launching of the offensive, by the night of 20-21
May, the advance had covered 150 miles and reached the Channel
coast. The ‘sickle cut’ had worked. The Allied forces had been cut in
two; vast numbers were now squeezed between the coast and the
oncoming German divisions. On 26 May the War Office in London
bowed to what had become increasingly inevitable, and ordered the
evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force, the bulk of it by then
fighting a desperate rearguard action just east of Dunkirk, the last
remaining Channel port in Allied hands. The next days would see
almost 340,000 British and French soldiers — the vast proportion of
the Allied troops still in combat in north-west France — carried to
safety across the Channel in an improvised armada of small boats
while the Luftwaffe pounded the harbour and beaches of the port.
The evacuation had been greatly helped by Hitler’s decision, at
11.42 a.m. on 24 May, to halt the German advance with the
spearhead a mere fifteen miles or so from Dunkirk. Post-war

suggestions that Hitler was deliberately allowing the British troops
to get away as an act of generosity to encourage Britain to come to
the peace table with its armies intact are far-fetched. Hitler himself
was alleged to have told his entourage a fortnight or so later that
‘the army is the backbone of England and the Empire. If we smash
the invasion corps, the Empire is doomed. Since we neither want to
nor can inherit it, we must leave it the chance. My generals haven’t
grasped that.’ Such sentiments, if they were indeed expressed in
those terms, were no more than a self-justification for a military
mistake. For the decision not to move on Dunkirk was taken for
military reasons, and on military advice. According to his Luftwaffe
adjutant, Nicolaus von Below, ‘the English army had no significance
for him’ at Dunkirk.

Hitler had flown that morning, 24 May, to Charleville, around
125 miles east of the Channel, to visit the headquarters of Colonel-
General Gerd von Rundstedt, commander of Army Group A, which
had made the remarkable advance in the ‘sickle movement’ along
the southern flank. When Hitler arrived at half-past eleven,
Rundstedt gave him a report on the situation. The suggestion to
hold back the motorized units came not from Hitler, but from
Rundstedt, one of his most trusted generals. Hitler agreed, adding
that the tanks had to be conserved for the coming operations in the
south and that a further advance would restrict the scope for action
of the Luftwaffe. Hitler was keen to press on with the attack to the
south without the delay that he thought would come about if they
took a few days dealing with the surrounded Allied troops in
Dunkirk. When Brauchitsch arrived next morning, the 25th, wanting
to advance the tanks on to the plains, Hitler opposed him, arguing
that the numerous canals criss-crossing Flanders made it an
unsuitable terrain for tanks. But he left the decision to Rundstedt,
who rejected the suggestion because of the need to have the tanks
recover for the operations to come in the south. Halder, as well as
Brauchitsch, was dismayed. They would have to come to terms with
a supreme commander of the Wehrmacht who intervened in the
direction of operations. But there was no magnanimity in the

decision to hold back the tanks. Hitler wanted to strike Britain a
knock-out blow to force her to accept peace terms. He had no
interest in allowing the British troops to escape captivity or
destruction. He had been persuaded by Goring to let the Luftwaffe
finish off the encircled enemy. He thought few of the British would
escape.

In fact, the Luftwaffe could not deliver on Goring’s promises.
Despite its claims of success, bad weather and the Royal Air Force
contrived to prevent the easy pickings Goring had imagined.
Dunkirk did nothing to enhance the Luftwaffe’s prestige. Within two
days, Hitler realized that the halt order had been an error. On 26
May, he reversed his decision and finally ordered the advance on
Dunkirk to prevent further evacuations. Few of the encircled troops
had got away by then. But the delay of forty-eight hours proved
vital in enabling the British to orchestrate the extraordinary retreat
— a masterpiece of improvisation accompanied by much good luck —
over the next days.

In military terms Dunkirk seemed, as one stunning success
followed another, of secondary importance to Germany. It
amounted in reality to a massive defeat for Britain. But that the
troops were brought back under such conditions to fight again
another day was converted by the new British Prime Minister
Churchill (who had come into office on the very day that the
western offensive had begun), and by popular myth, into a symbol
of the British fighting spirit — the archetypal triumph in adversity.
As such, the great setback at Dunkirk provided a boost to British
morale at one of the lowest points in the nation’s long history. In
another way, too, Dunkirk was fateful. If the British Expeditionary
Force had been lost, it is almost inconceivable that Churchill would
have survived the growing pressure from those powerful forces
within Britain that were ready to seek terms with Hitler.

Towards the end of the first week in June, Hitler moved his
headquarters to Briily-de-Pesche, in southern Belgium, near the
border with France. The second stage of the German offensive was
beginning. The French lines were rapidly overwhelmed. While the

French had more guns and tanks than the Germans, they were
hopelessly outmatched in air-power. Not just that: French weaponry
and tactics were outdated, not attuned to the demands of modern,
mechanized warfare. And, just as important, the French military
leadership conveyed their sense of defeatism to the rank-and-file.
Discipline collapsed along with morale. Taking their lead from their
fighting men, civilians fled from the big cities in their thousands.
Some looked to astrology. The faithful placed their trust in prayer
and the intercession of St Geneviéve. Neither would be enough.

On 14 June German troops penetrated the Maginot Line south of
Saarbrticken. That same day, less than five weeks since the launch
of the western offensive, their comrades entered Paris. A generation
earlier, the fathers and uncles of these soldiers had fought for four
years and not reached Paris. Now, the German troops had achieved
it in little over four weeks. The disparity in casualty figures
mirrored the magnitude of the victory. Allied losses were reckoned
at 90,000 dead, 200,000 wounded, and 1.9 million captured or
missing. German dead numbered almost 30,000, total casualties just
under 165,000.

It was no wonder that Hitler felt on top of the world, slapping his
thigh for joy — his usual expression of exultation — and laughing in
relief, when he was brought the news at Briily-de-Pesche on 17 June
that Marshal Pétain’s new French government had sued for peace.
The end of the war seemed imminent. England would now surely
give in. Total victory, Hitler imagined, was within his grasp.

Mussolini had brought Italy into the war a week earlier, hoping
to cash in on the action just before it was all over, in time to win
rich pickings and bask in the glory of a cheap victory. Hitler took
no pleasure in greeting his new companion-in-arms when he flew to
Munich to meet him on 18 June to discuss the French armistice
request. He wanted lenient terms for the French, and swiftly
dispelled Mussolini’s hopes of getting his hands on part of the
French fleet. Hitler was anxious to avoid the French navy going
over to the British - something which Churchill had already tried to
engineer. ‘From all that he says it is clear that he wants to act

quickly to end it,’ recorded Ciano. ‘Hitler is now the gambler who
has made a big scoop and would like to get up from the table
risking nothing more.’

Having won his great victory without any help from the Italians,
Hitler was determined that the embarrassed and disappointed
Mussolini, now forced to swallow his role as junior partner in the
Axis, should not participate in the armistice negotiations with the
French. Already on 20 May, when German tanks had reached the
French coast, Hitler had specified that the peace negotiations with
France, at which the return of former German territory would be
demanded, would take place in the Forest of Compiégne, where the
armistice of 1918 had taken place. He now gave orders to retrieve
Marshal Foch’s railway carriage, preserved as a museum piece, in
which the German generals had signed the ceasefire, and have it
brought to the forest clearing. That defeat, and its consequences,
had permanently seared Hitler’s consciousness. It would now be
erased by repaying the humiliation. At quarter past three on the
afternoon of 21 June, Hitler, accompanied by Goring, Raeder,
Brauchitsch, Keitel, Ribbentrop, and Hef$, viewed the memorial
recording the victory over the ‘criminal arrogance of the German
Reich’, then took his place in the carriage, greeting in silence the
French delegation. For ten minutes, he listened, again without a
word, though, as he later recounted, gripped by the feeling of
revenge for the humiliation of November 1918. Keitel read out the
preamble to the armistice terms. Hitler then left to return to his
headquarters. The symbolic purging of the old debt was completed.
‘The disgrace is now extinguished. It’s a feeling of being born
again,’ reported Goebbels after Hitler had told him of the dramatic
events late that night on the telephone.

France was to be divided — the north and western seaboard under
German occupation, the centre and south to be left as a puppet
state, headed by Pétain, with its seat of government at Vichy.
Following the signing of the Italian-French armistice on 24 June, all
fighting was declared to have ceased at 1.35 a.m. next morning.
Hitler proclaimed the end of the war in the west and the ‘most

glorious victory of all time’. He ordered bells to be rung in the
Reich for a week, and flags to be flown for ten days. As the moment
for the official conclusion of hostilities drew near, Hitler, sitting at
the wooden table in his field headquarters, ordered the lights put
out and the windows opened in order to hear, in the darkness, the
trumpeter outside mark the historic moment.

He spent part of the next days sightseeing. Max Amann (head of
the party’s publishing concerns) and Ernst Schmidt, two comrades
from the First World War, joined his regular entourage for a
nostalgic tour of the battlefields in Flanders, revisiting the places
where they had been stationed. Then, on 28 June, before most
Parisians were awake, Hitler paid his one and only visit to the
occupied French capital. It lasted no more than three hours.
Accompanied by the architects Hermann Giesler and Albert Speer,
and his favourite sculptor Arno Breker, Hitler landed at Le Bourget
airport at, for him, the extraordinarily early hour of half-past five in
the morning. The whistle-stop sightseeing tour began at |’Opéra.
Hitler was thrilled by its beauty. The tourists moved on. They drove
past La Madeleine, whose classical form impressed Hitler, up the
Champs Elysées, stopped at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier
below the Arc de Triomphe, viewed the Eiffel Tower, and looked in
silence on the tomb of Napoleon in Les Invalides. Hitler admired the
dimensions of the Panthéon, but found its interior (as he later
recalled) ‘a terrible disappointment’, and seemed indifferent to the
medieval wonders of Paris, like the Sainte Chapelle. The tour
ended, curiously, at the nineteenth-century testament to Catholic
piety, the church of Sacré-Coeur. With a last look over the city from
the heights of Montmartre, Hitler was gone. By mid-morning he
was back in his field headquarters. Seeing Paris, he told Speer, had
been the dream of his life. But to Goebbels, he said he had found a
lot of Paris very disappointing. He had considered destroying it.
However, he remarked, according to Speer, ‘when we’re finished in
Berlin, Paris will only be a shadow. Why should we destroy it?’

The reception awaiting Hitler in Berlin when his train pulled into
the Anhalter-Bahnhof at three o’clock on 6 July surpassed even the

homecomings after the great pre-war triumphs like the Anschlufs.
Many in the crowds had been standing for six hours as the dull
morning gave way to the brilliant sunshine of the afternoon. The
streets were strewn with flowers all the way from the station to the
Reich Chancellery. Hundreds of thousands cheered themselves
hoarse. Hitler, lauded by Keitel as ‘the greatest warlord of all time’,
was called out time after time on to the balcony to soak up the wild
adulation of the masses. ‘If an increase in feeling for Adolf Hitler
was still possible, it has become reality with the day of the return to
Berlin,’ commented one report from the provinces. In the face of
such ‘greatness’, ran another, ‘all pettiness and grumbling are
silenced’. Even opponents of the regime found it hard to resist the
victory mood. Workers in the armaments factories pressed to be
allowed to join the army. People thought final victory was around
the corner. Only Britain stood in the way. For perhaps the only time
during the Third Reich there was genuine war-fever among the
population. Incited by incessant propaganda, hatred of Britain was
now widespread. People were thirsting to see the high-and-mighty
long-standing rival finally brought to its knees. But mingling with
the aggression were still feelings of fear and anxiety. Whether
triumphalist, or fearful, the wish to bring the war to a speedy end
was almost universal.

Hitler had meanwhile changed his mind about delivering his
Reichstag speech on the Monday. On 3 July British ships had sunk a
number of French warships moored at the naval base of Mers-el-
Kébir, near Oran, in French Algeria, killing 1,250 French sailors in
the process. Churchill’s move, a show of British determination, was
to prevent the battle-fleet of his former allies falling into Hitler’s
hands. For Hitler, this brought a new situation. He wanted to await
developments. He was uncertain whether he ought to go ahead and
appeal to England. ‘He is still not ready for the final blow,’
remarked Goebbels. ‘He wants to think over his speech again in
peace and for that reason go to the Obersalzberg.’ If London should
refuse the last offer, then Britain would be ‘immediately following

dealt an annihilatory blow. The English apparently have no idea
what then awaits them.’

While he was at the Berghof, Hitler had talks with his military
leaders about a possible invasion of Britain, should his ‘peace offer’
be rejected. Raeder had advised Hitler in June that a naval landing
could only take place once the Luftwaffe had secured air superiority
over southern England. He repeated this precondition when he met
Hitler on 11 July on the Obersalzberg, advocating ‘concentrated
bombing’ to begin forthwith. But naval ambitions went far beyond a
presumed British surrender, thus obviating the need for what
Raeder, as well as Hitler, saw as the risky venture of invading
Britain. Germany would need a big navy to defend its colonial
empire, in particular against the looming threat of the United
States. Taking the opportunity to push the interests of the navy,
Raeder held out, therefore, the prospect of building up a great
battleship fleet to combat any potential Anglo-American naval
alliance. The next day Jodl outlined for Hitler initial thoughts on
operational plans for a landing. On Saturday, 13 July, it was
Halder’s turn to travel to the Berghof to report on operational plans.
But a landing was to be a last resort. ‘The Fuhrer is greatly puzzled
by Britain’s persisting unwillingness to make peace,’ Halder noted.
‘He sees the answer (as we do) in Britain’s hope on Russia and
therefore counts on having to compel her by main force to agree to
peace.’

On 16 July Hitler signed ‘Directive No. 16 for Preparations of a
Landing Operation against England’. The preamble ran: ‘Since
England, in spite of its militarily hopeless situation, still gives no
recognizable signs of readiness to come to terms, I have determined
to prepare a landing operation against England and, if need be, to
carry it out. The aim of this operation is to exclude the English
motherland as a basis for the continuation of the war against
Germany, and, if it should be necessary, to occupy it completely.’
Operational plans followed. But the qualifications in the preamble —
‘if need be’, ‘if necessary’ — indicated Hitler’s half-heartedness.

This conveyed itself to his army leaders. Rundstedt, Commander-
in-Chief in the West, simply did not take ‘Sealion’ seriously — a
feeling endorsed by Goring’s report of Hitler telling him privately
that he did not intend to carry out the operation. He never even
bothered to attend the amphibious landing exercises. To him and all
who studied them, given the strength of the British navy, the
logistic difficulties seemed insuperable.

If the British would only see sense, thought Hitler, it would be far
more desirable than an invasion. After signing the directive, he
fixed his Reichstag speech for the evening of Friday, 19 July.

The Reichstag had a military appearance that evening. Six seats,
of deputies who had fallen in the western campaign, had laurel
wreaths placed on them. In the front row were the gold-braided top
brass of the military, their chests heaving with medals and
decorations, many preening themselves on their new promotions to
Field-Marshals and Colonel-Generals. (Hitler had a cynical view
about promoting his military leaders. Through acts of generosity, as
in ancient times, they would be bound all the more, whatever their
political views, to their oaths of loyalty, and to him as the bestower
of such gifts. He intended their salaries to be tax-free, and would
not be miserly with donations of landed estates once the war was
finally won. This altered nothing of his view that the army
leadership — Brauchitsch and Halder in particular — had been found
seriously wanting once more, and that his own judgement had again
been proved right in the western campaign.)

The point of his speech, as he told Goebbels earlier that day, was
to make Britain a brief but imprecise offer, indicating that it was the
last word, and leaving the choice to London. A large part of the
speech, which lasted no less than two and a quarter hours, was
spent describing the course of the war, praising the military
achievements of the commanders, and listing their promotions. As
he came to the names of the twelve generals who were to be made
Field-Marshals, Hitler saluted each of them. From their places in the
balcony, they stood to attention and returned the salute. Special
mention was made of Goring, now elevated to Reich Marshal.

Goring was like a child with a new toy when Hitler gave him the
accompanying insignia. Hitler then emphasized the strength of
Germany’s position. Only in the last few minutes of his speech did
he reach the point that everyone was waiting for: his ‘appeal to
reason, also in England’. The ‘appeal’ came and went — in those
words, and little besides. There was the usual accusation levelled at
Churchill as the warmonger. There was the threat that Britain, and
the British Empire, would be destroyed. There was a hypocritical
expression of regret for the victims of continued war. And there was
the victor’s ‘appeal to reason’. That was all. It was little wonder that
the reaction, even among those around Hitler, was one of
disappointment — especially when the British categorical rejection of
the ‘offer’ was announced within the hour.

Hitler had misjudged the mood in Britain. And his speech had not
been tuned to offer anything that might tempt the opponents of
Churchill, who could have formed a peace-lobby. He was evidently
still hoping for a diplomatic solution when he met the Commanders-
in-Chief of the Wehrmacht on 21 July. ‘Crossing of Channel appears
very hazardous to the Fuhrer. On that account, invasion is to be
undertaken only if no other way is left to bring terms with Britain,’
Halder reported. ‘Britain’s position is hopeless. The war is won by
us,’ Hitler stated.

But Britain still put her hopes in America, and in Russia. There
was the possibility, said Hitler, referring to rumours of crisis in
London, that a cabinet including Lloyd George, Chamberlain, and
Halifax might come to power and seek peace-terms. But, failing
that, Britain would have to be reduced by an air-offensive combined
with intensified submarine warfare to the state, by mid-September,
when an invasion could be carried out. Hitler would decide within
days, after hearing Raeder’s report in mid-week on naval
operational logistics, whether the invasion would be carried out by
autumn. Otherwise, it would be before the following May. The final
decision on the intensity of submarine and air attacks would be left
until the beginning of August. There was the possibility that the
invasion might begin as early as 25 August.

Hitler turned finally to the issue which had already started to
bother him: the position of Russia. Stalin, he pointed out, had his
own agenda. He was flirting with Britain to keep her in the war, tie
down Germany, and exploit the situation to undertake his own
expansionist policy. There were no indications of any Russian
aggression towards Germany. ‘But,’ went on Hitler, ‘our attention
must be turned to tackling the Russian problem and prepare
planning.’ It would take four to six weeks to assemble the German
military force. Its object would be ‘to crush the Russian army or at
least take as much Russian territory as is necessary to bar enemy air
raids on Berlin and Silesian industries’. He also mentioned the need
to protect the Romanian oil-fields. Eighty to 100 divisions would be
required. He contemplated attacking Russia that very autumn.
Compared with what had been achieved in the west, Hitler had
remarked to Jodl and Keitel already at the time of the French
capitulation, ‘a campaign against Russia would be child’s play’.

It was an astonishing prospect that Hitler held out to his army
leaders. He was, of course, not yet committing himself to anything.
But the two-front war which had always been anathema was now
being actively entertained. Paradoxically, having advocated since
the 1920s a showdown with the Soviet Union to destroy Bolshevism
and win Lebensraum, Hitler had now come back to the idea of a war
against Russia for strategic reasons: to force his erstwhile would-be
friend, Britain, now stubbornly holding out against the odds, to
terms. The ideological aim of smashing Bolshevism, though
apparently invoked by Hitler as part of his reasoning, was at this
point secondary to the strategic need to get Britain out of the war.
It was a sign of the difficulties that Hitler had manoeuvred himself
into. Britain would not play his game. But the military lesson he
kept saying she would have to be taught, and which the German
public now awaited, would be, he knew, a hazardous affair. So he
was now moving to a step he — and most of his generals did not
disagree — thought less dangerous: an attack on the Soviet Union.

In fact, the army command, worried about the build-up of Soviet
troops in southern Russia in connection with Stalin’s increasing

pressure on the Balkan states, had already, in mid-June, added a
further nine motorized divisions to the fifteen divisions previously
designated for transfer to the east. And on 3 July Halder, without
any orders from Hitler but following indications evidently passed on
to him by Weizsacker, in the Foreign Office, showed himself ready
to anticipate the change in direction, to ‘work towards the Fuhrer’,
when he deemed it appropriate to have the possibilities of a
campaign against the Soviet Union tested. The Chief of Staff, ahead
of Hitler at this point, raised with his operational planners ‘the
requirements of a military intervention which will compel Russia to
recognize Germany’s dominant position in Europe’.

Hitler was still avoiding a final decision on Britain. But it was
with the impression that Lord Halifax’s official spurning of his
‘peace offer’ in a broadcast speech on the evening of 22 July
amounted to ‘England’s final rejection’ that he left, for what was to
prove the last time, for Bayreuth, to see next day a performance of
Gotterdammerung. ‘The die is cast,’ wrote Goebbels. ‘We’re tuning
press and radio to a fight.’ In fact, the die had not been finally cast.
Hitler remained unsure how to proceed.

He had long since convinced himself of what German propaganda
was trumpeting. It was he who wanted peace. Churchill, backed by
the ‘Jewish plutocracy’, was the warmonger — the obstacle to the
triumph. While in Bayreuth, Hitler saw the friend of his youth days,
August Kubizek, for the last time. Hitler told Kubizek, as gullible as
ever, that the war had hindered all his great plans for rebuilding
Germany. ‘I did not become Chancellor of the Great German Reich
in order to wage war,’ he said. Kubizek believed him. Probably
Hitler believed himself.

He went from Bayreuth to the Obersalzberg. While he was there,
the army leadership learnt from Raeder that the navy could not be
ready for operations against England before 15 September. The
earliest date for an invasion, depending on the moon and tides, was
the 26th of that month. If that date proved impossible, the invasion
would have to be put off until the following May. Brauchitsch
doubted that the navy could provide the basis for an invasion in the

autumn. (In fact, the navy had concluded that it was highly
inadvisable to attempt to invade at any point that year, and was
extremely sceptical about the prospects of an invasion at all.)
Halder agreed with Brauchitsch in eliminating the notion of an
operation during bad weather. But they foresaw disadvantages,
military and political, in a postponement to the following year.
They considered possibilities of weakening Britain’s overseas
position through attacks on Gibraltar, Haifa, and Suez, support for
the Italians in Egypt, and inciting the Russians to move on the
Persian Gulf. An attack on Russia was rejected in favour of the
maintenance of friendly relations.

Hitler, meantime, had been privately consulting Jodl. On 29 July
he asked the Chief of the Wehrmacht Directional Staff about
deploying the army in the east, and whether it might be possible to
attack and defeat Russia that very autumn. JodI totally ruled it out
on practical grounds. In that case, Hitler said, absolute confidence
was needed. Feasibility studies were to be undertaken, but
knowledge confined to only a few staff officers. Remarkably, in
fact, the Wehrmacht had not waited for Hitler’s order. ‘The army,’
Jodl was later to remark, ‘had already learnt of the Fihrer’s
intentions at the stage when these were still being weighed up. An
operational plan was therefore drawn up even before the order for
this was given.’ And already in July, as he later put it ‘on his own
initiative’, Major-General Bernhard von Lofsberg, from the National
Defence Department, headed by Major-General Walter Warlimont,
had begun work on an ‘operational study for a Russian campaign’.
The draft plan was at this stage merely intended to be held in
readiness for the point at which it might be needed. Hitler’s
discussion with Jodl indicated that this point had arrived.

Lo&berg, two other members of Warlimont’s staff, and Warlimont
himself, were sitting in the restaurant car of the special train Atlas,
in the station at Bad Reichenhall, when Jodl came down from the
Berghof to report on his discussion with Hitler. According to
Warlimont, the consternation at what they heard — meaning the
dreaded war on two fronts — gave rise to an hour of bitter

argument. Jodl countered by stating Hitler’s opinion that it was
better to have the inevitable war against Bolshevism now, with
German power at its height, than later; and that by autumn 1941
victory in the east would have brought the Luftwaffe to its peak for
deployment against Britain. Whatever the objections — it is
impossible to know whether Warlimont was exaggerating them in
his post-war account — the feasibility studies under the code-name
‘Aufbau-Ost’ (‘Build-Up in the East’) were now undertaken with a
greater sense of urgency.

Two days later, on 31 July, Hitler met his military leaders at the
Berghof. Raeder repeated the conclusion his naval planners had
reached that the earliest date for an invasion of Britain could be no
sooner than 15 September, and favoured postponing it until the
following May. Hitler wanted to keep his options open. Things
would become difficult with the passing of time. Air attacks should
begin straight away. They would determine Germany’s relative
strength. ‘If results of air warfare are unsatisfactory, invasion
preparations will be stopped. If we have the impression that the
English are crushed and that effects will soon begin to tell, we shall
proceed to the attack,’ he stated. He remained sceptical about an
invasion. The risks were high; so, however, was the prize, he added.
But he was already thinking of the next step. What if no invasion
took place? He returned to the hopes Britain placed in the USA and
in Russia. If Russia were to be eliminated, then America, too, would
be lost for Britain because of the increase in Japan’s power in the
Far East. Russia was ‘the factor on which Britain is relying the
most’. The British had been ‘completely down’. Now they had
revived. Russia had been shaken by events in the west. The British
were clutching on, hoping for a change in the situation during the
next few months.

He moved to his momentous conclusion: remove Russia from the
equation. Halder’s notes retained Hitler’s emphasis. ‘With Russia
smashed, Britain’s last hope would be shattered. Germany then will be
master of Europe and the Balkans. Decision: Russia’s destruction must
therefore be made a part of this struggle. Spring 1941. The sooner Russia

is crushed the better. Attack achieves its purpose only if Russian state
can be shattered to its roots with one blow. Holding part of the
country alone will not do. Standing still for the following winter
would be perilous. So it is better to wait a little longer, but with the
resolute determination to eliminate Russia ... If we start in May
1941, we would have five months to finish the job.’

Unlike the anxious reactions on the occasions in 1938 and 1939
when the generals had feared war with Britain, there is no
indication that they were horror-struck at what they heard. The
fateful underestimation of the Russian military potential was
something Hitler shared with his commanders. Intelligence on the
Soviet army was poor. But the underestimation was not solely the
result of poor intelligence. Airs of disdain for Slavs mingled easily
with contempt for what Bolshevism had managed to achieve.
Contact with Soviet generals in the partition of Poland had not
impressed the Germans. The dismal showing of the Red Army in
Finland (where the inadequately equipped Finns had inflicted
unexpected and heavy losses on the Soviets in the early stages of
the ‘Winter War’ of 1939-40) had done nothing to improve its
image in their eyes. Not least, there was the apparent madness
which had prompted Stalin to destroy his own officer corps.
Whereas an attack on the British Isles remained a perilous
undertaking, an assault on the Soviet Union raised no great alarm. A
true ‘lightning war’ could be expected here.

The day after the meeting on the Berghof, Hitler signed Directive
No. 17, intensifying the air-war and sea-war against Britain as the
basis for her ‘final subjugation’. He explicitly — underscoring the
sentence in the Directive — reserved for himself a decision on the
use of terror-bombing. The offensive was set to begin four days
later, but was postponed until the 8th. It was again postponed on
account of the weather conditions until the 13th. From then on, the
German fighters sought to sweep the Royal Air Force from the
skies. Wave after wave of attacks on the airfields of southern
England was launched. Spitfires, Hurricanes and Messerschmitts
wheeled, arched, dived, and strafed each other in the dramatic and

heroic dogfights on which Britain’s survival at this point depended.
The early optimistic results announced in Berlin soon proved highly
misleading. The task was beyond the Luftwaffe. At first by the skin
of their teeth the young British pilots held out, then gradually won
the ascendancy. Despite Hitler’s orders that he alone was to decide
on terror-bombing, 100 planes of the Luftwaffe, acting, it seems,
under a loosely worded directive from Goring issued on 2 August,
had attacked London’s East End on the night of 24 August. As
retaliation, the RAF carried out the first British bombing raids on
Berlin the following night.

Hitler regarded the bombing of Berlin as a disgrace. As usual, his
reaction was to threaten massive retaliation. ‘We’ll wipe out their
cities! We’ll put an end to the work of these night pirates,’ he fumed
at a speech in the Sportpalast on 4 September. He spoke with
Goring about undertaking the revenge. From 7 September the
nightly bombing of London began. It was the turn of the citizens of
Britain’s capital to experience night after night the terror from the
skies. The shift to terror-bombing marked a move away from the
idea of the landing which Hitler had never whole-heartedly
favoured. Persuaded by Goring, he now thought for a while that
Britain could be bombed to the conference-table without German
troops having to undertake the perilous landing. But, dreadful
though the ‘Blitz’ was, the Luftwaffe was simply not powerful
enough to bomb Britain to submission.

Between 10 and 13 September there were signs that Hitler had
gone utterly cold on the idea of a landing. On 14 September he then
told his commanders that the conditions for ‘Operation Sealion’ —
the operational plan to attack Great Britain — had not been attained.

Meanwhile, the dogfights over southern England and the Channel
coast intensified during the first fortnight in September, reaching a
climacteric on Sunday the 15th. The Wehrmacht admitted 182
planes lost in that fortnight, forty-three on the 15th alone. The
horrors of the ‘Blitz’ would continue for months to be inflicted upon
British cities - among the worst devastation the bombing of
Coventry on the night of 14 November, as the German onslaught

switched to the industrial belt of the Midlands to strike at more
manageable targets than London. But the ‘Battle of Britain’ was
over. Hitler had never been convinced that the German air-offensive
would successfully lay the basis for the invasion of which he was in
any case so sceptical. On 17 September he ordered the indefinite
postponement — though, for psychological reasons, not the
cancellation — of ‘Operation Sealion’.

The peace-overtures had failed. The battle for the skies had
failed. Meanwhile, on 3 September the grant of fifty destroyers to
Britain by the USA — a deal which Roosevelt had eventually pushed
through, initially against much opposition from the isolationists —
was, despite the limited use of the elderly warships, the plainest
indication to date that Britain might in the foreseeable future be
able to reckon with the still dormant military might of the USA. It
was increasingly urgent to get Britain out of the war. Hitler’s
options were, in autumn 1940, still not closed off. There was the
possibility of forcing Britain to come to terms through a strategy of
attacks on her Mediterranean and Near Eastern strongholds. But
once that option also faded Hitler was left with only one possibility:
the one that was in his view not only strategically indispensable but
embodied one of his most long-standing ideological obsessions. This
point would not finally be reached until December 1940. By then it
would be time to prepare for the crusade against Bolshevism.

Ill

In 1940, Hitler was at the zenith of his power. But he did not have
enough power to bring the war to the conclusion he wanted. And,
within Germany, he was powerless to prevent the governance of the
Reich from slipping increasingly out of control. The tendencies
already plainly evident before the war — unresolved Party-State
dualism, unclear or overlapping spheres of competence,
proliferation of ad hoc establishment of improvised ‘special
authorities’ in specific policy areas, administrative anarchy — were
now sharply magnified. It was not that Hitler was a ‘weak dictator’.

His power was recognized and acknowledged on all fronts. Nothing
of significance was undertaken in contradiction to his known
wishes. His popular support was immense. Opponents were
demoralized and without hope. There was no conceivable challenge
that could be mounted. The slippage from control did not mean a
decline in Hitler’s authority. But it did mean that the very nature of
that authority had built into it the erosion and undermining of
regular patterns of government and, at the same time, the inability
to keep in view all aspects of rule of an increasingly expanding and
complex Reich. Even someone more able, energetic, and industrious
when it came to administration than Hitler could not have done it.
And during the first months of the war, as we have seen, Hitler was
for lengthy stretches away from Berlin and overwhelmingly
preoccupied with military events. It was impossible for him to stay
completely in touch with and be competently involved in the
running of the Reich. But in the absence of any organ of collective
government to replace the cabinet, which had not met since
February 1938, or any genuine delegation of powers (which Hitler
constantly shied away from, seeing it as a potentially dangerous
dilution of his authority), the disintegration of anything resembling
a coherent ‘system’ of administration inevitably accelerated. Far
from diminishing Hitler’s power, the continued erosion of any
semblance of collective government actually enhanced it. Since,
however, this disintegration went hand in hand — part cause, part
effect — with the Darwinian struggle carried out through recourse to
Hitler’s ideological goals, the radicalization entailed in the process
of ‘working towards the Fuhrer’ equally inevitably accelerated.

The ideological drive of National Socialism was inextricable from
the endemic conflict within the regime. Without this ideological
drive, embodied in Hitler’s ‘mission’ (as perceived by his more
fanatical followers), the break-up of government into the near-
anarchy of competing fiefdoms and internecine rivalries is
inexplicable. But internal radicalization went beyond Hitler’s
personal involvement. ‘Working towards’ his ‘vision’ was the key to
success in the internal war of the regime.

However bitter the rivalries, all those involved could have
recourse to the ‘wishes of the Fuhrer’, and claim they were working
towards the fulfilment of his ‘vision’. At stake were not aims, but
methods — and, above all, realms of power. The very nature of the
loose mandate given to Hitler’s paladins, the scope they were given
to build and extend their own empires, and the unclarity of the
divisions of competence, guaranteed continued struggle and
institutional anarchy. At the same time, it ensured the unfolding of
ceaseless energy to drive on the ideological radicalization.
Governmental disorder and ‘cumulative radicalization’ were two
sides of the same coin.

Radicalization of the National Socialist ‘programme’, vague as it
was, could not possibly subside. The ways different power-groups
and important individuals in positions of influence interpreted the
ideological imperative represented by Hitler saw to it that the
dream of the new society to be created through war, struggle,
conquest, and racial purification was kept in full view. At the grass-
roots level, banal — though for the individuals concerned certainly
not unimportant — material considerations like the chronic housing
shortage, the growing scarcity and increasing cost of consumer
goods, or an acute shortage of farm labourers could produce
resentments easily channelled towards disparaged minorities and
fuelled by petty greed at the prospect of acquiring goods or
property belonging to Jews. The flames of such social antagonisms
were fanned by the hate-filled messages of propaganda. The
mentalities that were fostered offered an open door to the
fanaticism of the believers. The internal competition built into the
regime ensured that the radical drive was not only sustained, but
intensified as fresh opportunities were provided by the war. And as
victory seemed imminent, new breathtaking vistas for rooting out
racial enemies, displacing inferior populations, and building the
‘brave new world’ opened up.

With scarcely any direct involvement by Hitler, racial policy
unfolded its own dynamic. Within the Reich, pressures to rid
Germany of its Jews once and for all increased. In the asylums, the

killing of the mentally sick inmates was in full swing. And the
security mania of the nation at war, threatened by enemies on all
sides and within, coupled with the heightened demands for national
unity, encouraged the search for new ‘outsider’ target groups.
‘Foreign workers’, especially those from Poland, were in the front
line of the intensified persecution.

However, the real crucible was Poland. Here, racial megalomania
had carte blanche. But it was precisely the absence of any
systematic planning in the free-for-all of unlimited power that
produced the unforeseen logistical problems and administrative cul-
de-sacs of ‘ethnic cleansing’ which in turn evoked ever more radical,
genocidal approaches.

Those who enjoyed positions of power and influence saw the
occupation of Poland as an opportunity to ‘solve the Jewish
Question’ — despite the fact that now more Jews than ever had
fallen within the clutches of the Third Reich. For the SS, entirely
new perspectives had emerged. Among party leaders, all the
Gauleiter wanted to be rid of ‘their’ Jews and now saw possibilities
of doing so. These were starting points. At the same time, for those
ruling the parts of former Poland which had been incorporated into
the Reich, the expulsion of the Jews from their territories was only
part of the wider aim of Germanization, to be achieved as rapidly as
possible. This meant also tackling the ‘Polish Question’, removing
thousands of Poles to make room for ethnic Germans from the
Baltic and other areas, classifying the ‘better elements’ as German,
and reducing the rest to uneducated helots available to serve the
German masters. ‘Ethnic cleansing’ to produce the required
Germanization through resettlement was intrinsically connected
with the radicalization of thinking on the ‘Jewish Question’.

Beginning only days after the German invasion of Poland,
Security Police and party leaders in Prague, Vienna, and Kattowitz —
seizing on the notions expounded by Heydrich of a ‘Jewish
reservation’ to be set up east of Cracow — saw the chance of
deporting the Jews from their areas. Eichmann’s own initiative and
ambition appear to have triggered the hopes of immediate expulsion

of the Jews. Between 18 and 26 October he organized the transport
of several thousands of Jews from Vienna, Kattowitz, and Moravia
to the Nisko district, south of Lublin. Gypsies from Vienna were also
included in the deportation. At the same time, the resettlement of
the Baltic Germans began. Within days of the Nisko transports
beginning, the lack of provision for the deported Jews in Poland,
creating chaotic circumstances following their arrival, led to their
abrupt halt. But it was a foretaste of the greater deportations to
come.

At the end of the month, in his new capacity as Reich Commissar
for the Consolidation of Germandom, Himmler ordered all Jews to
be cleared out of the incorporated territories. The deportation of
around 550,000 Jews was envisaged. On top of that came several
hundred thousand of the ‘especially hostile Polish population’,
making a figure of about a million persons in all. From the largest
of the areas designated for deportations and the resettlement of
ethnic Germans, the Warthegau, it proved impossible to match the
numbers initially charted for deportation, or the speed at which
their removal had been foreseen. Even so, 128,011 Poles and Jews
were forcibly deported under horrifying conditions by spring 1940.
Sadistic SS men would arrive at night, clear entire tenement blocks,
and load up the inhabitants — subjected to every form of bestial
humiliation — on to open lorries, despite the intense cold, to be
taken to holding camps, from where they were herded into
unheated and massively overcrowded cattle-trucks and sent south,
without possessions and often without food or water. Deaths were
frequent on the journeys. Those who survived often suffered from
frostbite or other legacies of their terrible ordeal. The deportees
were sent to the General Government, seen in the annexed
territories as a type of dumping-ground for undesirables. But the
Governor General, Hans Frank, was no keener on having Jews in his
area than were the Gauleiter of the incorporated regions. He
envisaged them rotting in a reservation, but outside his own
territory. In November 1939 Frank had plainly laid down the
intentions for his own province. It was a pleasure, he stated, finally

to be able physically to tackle the Jewish race: ‘The more who die,
the better ... The Jews should see that we have arrived. We want to
have a half to three-quarters of all Jews put east of the Vistula.
We'll suppress these Jews everywhere we can. The whole business
is at stake here. The Jews out of the Reich, Vienna, from
everywhere. We’ve no use for Jews in the Reich.’

Around the same time as Frank was voicing such sentiments, the
Reich Governor of the Wartheland, Arthur Greiser, speaking of
encountering in Lodz ‘figures who can scarcely be credited with the
designation “person” ’, was letting it be known that the ‘Jewish
Question’ was as good as solved. However, by early 1940, his hopes
(and those of Wilhelm Koppe, police chief of the Warthegau) of the
quick expulsion of the Jews into the General Government were
already proving vain ones. Hans Frank and his subordinates were
starting to raise objections at the numbers of Jews they were being
forced to take in, without any clear planning for what was to
become of them, and with their own hopes of sending them on
further to a reservation — an idea meanwhile abandoned — now
vanished. Frank was able to win the support of Goring, whose own
interest was in preventing the loss of manpower useful for the war
effort. Goring’s strong criticism of the ‘wild resettlement’ at a
meeting on 12 February ran counter to Himmler’s demands for
room for hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans, already moved
from their original homes. The very next day, Jews from Stettin
were deported to the Lublin area to make way for Baltic Germans
‘with sea-faring jobs’. The police chief of the Lublin district, Odilo
Globocnik, suggested that if the Jews coming to the General
Government could not feed themselves, or be fed by other Jews,
they should be left to starve. On 24 March, at Frank’s bidding,
Goring felt compelled to ban all ‘evacuation’ into the General
Government ‘until further notice’. Greiser was told that his request
to deport the Warthegau’s Jews would have to be deferred until
August. From 1 May 1940 the huge ghetto at Lodz, containing
163,177 persons, initially established only as a temporary measure
until the Warthegau’s Jews could be pushed over the border into the

General Government, was sealed off from the rest of the city.
Mortalities from disease and starvation started to rocket during the
summer. At a meeting in Cracow on 31 July, Greiser was told by
Frank in no uncertain terms of Himmler’s assurance, under
instructions by Hitler, that no more Jews were to be deported to the
General Government. And on 6 November 1940 Frank informed
Greiser by telegram that there were to be no further deportations
into the General Government before the end of the war. Himmler
was aware of this. Any transports would be turned back. The
solution which to Greiser had seemed so close to hand a year earlier
was indefinitely blocked.

As one door closed, another opened — or, for a brief moment,
appeared to open. At the meeting in Cracow at the end of July,
Greiser mentioned a new possibility that had emerged. He had
heard personally from Himmler, he reported, ‘that the intention
now exists to shove the Jews overseas into specific areas’. He
wanted early clarification.

Resettling Jews on the island of Madagascar, a French colony off
the African coast, had for decades been vaguely mooted in
antisemitic circles, not just in Germany, as a potential solution to
the ‘Jewish Question’. With the prospect looming larger in the
spring of 1940 of regaining colonial territories in the near future
(and acquiring some which had not previously belonged to
Germany), Madagascar now began to be evoked as a distinct policy
option. It seems to have been Himmler, perhaps testing the waters,
who at this point first broached in the highest circles the idea of
deporting the Jews to an African colony, though he did not refer
specifically to Madagascar. In the middle of May, after a visit to
Poland, the Reichsfihrer-SS produced a six-page memorandum
(which Hitler read and approved) entitled ‘Some Thoughts on the
Treatment of the Alien Population in the East’, detailing brutal plans
for racial selection in Poland. Only in one brief passage did
Himmler mention what he envisaged would happen to the Jews.
‘The term “Jew”,’ he wrote, ‘I hope to see completely extinguished

through the possibility of a large-scale emigration of all Jews to
Africa or to some other colony.’

Sensing what was in the wind, the newly appointed, highly
ambitious head of the Foreign Ministry’s ‘Jewish Desk’, Franz
Rademacher, prepared a lengthy internal memorandum on 3 June
putting forward, as a war aim, three options: removing all Jews
from Europe; deporting western European Jews, for example, to
Madagascar while leaving eastern Jews in the Lublin district as
hostages to keep America paralysed in its fight against Germany
(presuming the influence of American Jewry would in these
circumstances deter the USA from entering the war); or establishing
a Jewish national home in Palestine — a solution he did not favour.
This was the first time that Madagascar had been explicitly
mentioned in a policy document as a possible ‘solution to the Jewish
Question’. It was a product of Rademacher’s initiative, rather than a
result of instructions from above. With the backing of Ribbentrop
(who had probably himself gained the approval of Hitler and
Himmler), Rademacher set to work to put detail on his proposal to
resettle all Europe’s Jews on the island of Madagascar, seeing them
as under German mandate but Jewish administration. Heydrich,
presumably alerted by Himmler at the first opportunity, was,
however, not prepared to concede control over such a vital issue to
the Foreign Ministry. On 24 June he made plain to Ribbentrop that
responsibility for handling the ‘Jewish Question’ was his, under the
commission given to him by Goring in January 1939. Emigration
was no longer the answer. ‘A territorial final solution will therefore
be necessary.’ He sought inclusion in all discussions ‘which concern
themselves with the final solution of the Jewish question’ — the first
time, it seems, the precise words ‘final solution’ were used, and at
this point plainly in the context of territorial resettlement. By mid-
August Eichmann and his right-hand man Theo Dannecker had
devised in some detail plans to put 4 million Jews on Madagascar.
The SD’s plan envisaged no semblance of Jewish autonomous
administration. The Jews would exist under strict SS control. Soon
after Rademacher had submitted his original proposal, in early

June, the Madagascar idea had evidently been taken to Hitler,
presumably by Ribbentrop. The Foreign Minister told Ciano later in
the month ‘that it is the Fuhrer’s intention to create a free Jewish
state in Madagascar to which he will compulsorily send the many
millions of Jews who live on the territory of the old Reich as well
as on the territories recently conquered’. In the middle of August,
reporting on a conversation with Hitler, Goebbels still noted: ‘We
want later to transport the Jews to Madagascar.’

Already by this time, however, the Madagascar plan had had its
brief heyday. Putting it into effect would have depended not only
on forcing the French to hand over their colony — a relatively simple
matter — but on attaining control over the seas through the defeat of
the British navy. With the continuation of the war the plan fell by
the end of the year into abeyance and was never resurrected. But
through the summer, for three months or so, the idea was taken
seriously by all the top Nazi leadership, including Hitler himself.

Hitler’s rapid endorsement of such an ill-thought-out and
impracticable scheme reflected his superficial involvement in anti-
Jewish policy during 1940. His main interests that year were plainly
elsewhere, in the direction of war strategy. For the time being at
least, the ‘Jewish Question’ was a secondary matter for him.
However, the broad mandate to ‘solve the Jewish Question’
associated with his ‘mission’, coupled with the blockages in doing so
in occupied Poland, sufficed. Others were more active than Hitler
himself. To Goebbels, Hitler gave merely the assurance that the
Jews were earmarked to leave Berlin, without approving any
immediate action. Some had more luck with their demands. As in
the east, the Gauleiter given responsibilities in the newly occupied
areas in the west were keen to exploit their position to get rid of
the Jews from their Gaue. In July Robert Wagner, Gauleiter of
Baden and now in charge of Alsace, and Josef Biirckel, Gauleiter of
the Saar-Palatinate and Chief of the Civil Administration in
Lorraine, both pressed Hitler to allow the expulsion westwards into
Vichy France of the Jews from their domains. Hitler gave his
approval. Some 3,000 Jews were deported that month from Alsace

into the unoccupied zone of France. In October, following a further
meeting with the two Gauleiter, a total of 6,504 Jews were sent to
France in nine trainloads, without any prior consultation with the
French authorities, who appeared to have in mind their further
deportation to Madagascar as soon as the sea-passage was secure.

Above all, the running in radicalizing anti-Jewish policy was
made by the SS and Security Police leadership. While Hitler at this
time paid relatively little attention to the ‘Jewish Question’ when
not faced with a particular issue that one of his underlings had
raised, Himmler and Heydrich were heavily engaged in planning the
‘new order’, especially in eastern Europe. Hitler’s decision, taken
under the impact of the failure to end the war in the west, to
prepare for the invasion of the Soviet Union opened up new
prospects again in the east for a ‘solution’ to the ‘Jewish Question’.
Once more, policy in the General Government was reversed. Hans
Frank, who had been expecting in the summer to have the Jews
from his area shipped to Madagascar, was now told that they had to
stay. Emigration from the General Government was banned. The
brutal forced-labour conditions and ghettoization were already
highly attritional. Jews were in practice often being worked to
death. An overtly genocidal mentality was already evident.
Heydrich suggested starting an epidemic in the newly sealed
Warsaw ghetto in autumn 1940 in order to exterminate the Jews
there through such means. It was into an area in which this
mentality prevailed that Frank, so Hitler told him in December, had
to be prepared to take more Jews.

With Hitler playing little active role, but providing blanket
approval, conditions and mentalities had been created in the
occupied territories of former Poland in which full-scale genocide
was only one step away.

Before Hitler signed the directive in December 1940 to prepare
what would rapidly be shaped into a ‘war of annihilation’ against

the Soviet Union, there was a hiatus in which the immediate future
direction of the war remained uncertain. Hitler was ready, during
this phase that stretched from September to December 1940, to
explore different possibilities of prising Britain out of the conflict
before the Americans could enter it. Out of the failure of the
‘peripheral strategy’, a term hinted at by Jodl at the end of July,
which at no stage gained Hitler’s full enthusiasm, the hardening of
the intention to invade the Soviet Union, first mooted in July,
emerged until, on 18 December, it was embodied in a war directive.

With the invasion of Russia in the autumn of 1940, as initially
proposed by Hitler, excluded on practical grounds by Jodl, other
ways of retaining the strategic initiative had to be sought. Hitler
was open to a number of suggestions. Ribbentrop was able to
resurrect the idea he had promoted before the war, of an anti-
British bloc of Germany, Italy, Japan, and the Soviet Union. The
new situation in the wake of the German victories in western
Europe now also opened the prospect of extending the anti-British
front through gaining the active cooperation of Spain and Vichy
France in the Mediterranean zone, together with a number of
satellite states in south-eastern Europe. For Japan, the overrunning
of the Netherlands and defeat of France, together with the serious
weakening of Britain, offered an open invitation to imperialist
expansion in south-eastern Asia. The Dutch East Indies and French
Indo-China offered irresistible temptation, with the lure of the
British possessions — including Singapore, British Borneo, Burma,
and beyond that India itself - as an eventual further prize. Japan’s
interests in expanding to the south made her willing now to ease the
long-standing tensions in relations with the Soviet Union. At the
same time, Japan was keen to improve relations with Germany,
soured since the Hitler—Stalin Pact, in order to have a free hand in
south-eastern Asia. Hitler at this time opposed any formal alliance
with Japan. Only in late summer, persuaded that Britain would not
accept his ‘offer’, and concerned that America could soon enter the
war (a step appearing closer since the news of the destroyer deal
with Britain), did Hitler reverse this position. The negotiations that

began in late August led to the signing of the Tripartite Pact on 27
September 1940, under which Germany, Italy, and Japan agreed to
assist each other in the event of one of the signatories being
attacked by an external power not involved in the European or Sino-
Japanese conflicts - meaning, of course, the United States.

Raeder, too, was able to take advantage of Hitler’s uncertainty in
the late summer and autumn of 1940. In September the
Commander-in-Chief of the navy put forward two memoranda
strongly advocating a strategy directed at destroying Britain’s
strength in the Mediterranean and Near East. Hitler was not
discouraging to Raeder’s ambitious proposal — aimed squarely
against Great Britain — to seize control (with Spanish assistance) of
Gibraltar and the Suez Canal, before pushing through Palestine and
Syria to the Turkish border. With Turkey ‘in our power’, as Raeder
put it, the threat of the Soviet Union would be diminished. It would
be ‘questionable whether then moving against the Russians from the
north would still be necessary’, he concluded.

Hitler did not demur. He remarked that after the conclusion of
the alliance with Japan he wanted to carry out talks with Mussolini
and perhaps with Franco before deciding whether it was more
advantageous to work with France or Spain.

Franco had opportunistically looked to join the Axis in mid-June,
counting on spoils in a war about to be won (as it seemed). He
wanted Gibraltar, French Morocco, and Oran, the former Spanish
province currently in French Algeria. There was at the time every
reason for Hitler to avoid acting on proposals that could have
jeopardized the armistice. In September, a diplomatic balancing-act
to ensure support for the Mediterranean strategy of France, Spain,
and Italy now appeared desirable and timely. Ribbentrop and
Ramon Serrano Sumner, Franco’s brother-in-law and personal
emissary, soon to be the Spanish Foreign Minister, met in Berlin on
16 September. But all that was forthcoming was an offer by Franco
to meet Hitler on the Spanish border in October.

Before that, on 4 October, Hitler met Mussolini at the Brenner.
Ribbentrop, feeling unwell and uncharacteristically quiet, and Ciano

were also present. Hitler raised the question of Spanish
intervention, outlining Franco’s demands. Mussolini agreed on the
stance to be taken towards Spain, reaffirming Italian demands of
France to cede Nice, Corsica, Tunis, and Djibouti — claims in effect
placed in cold storage at the armistice. Ciano drew the conclusions
from the meeting that the proposed landing in Britain would not
take place, that the aim was now to win over France to the anti-
British coalition, since Britain was proving more difficult to defeat
than anticipated, and that the Mediterranean sector had, to Italy’s
advantage, won greater significance.

The meeting had been cordial. But eight days later Mussolini’s
patience was stretched once more when he heard, without prior
warning, that a German military commission had been dispatched to
Bucharest and that the Germans were taking over the defence of the
Romanian oil-fields. Mussolini’s retaliation was to order the
invasion of Greece for the end of the month, to present Hitler this
time with a fait accompli. Hitler had warned against such a venture
on numerous occasions.

On 20 October Hitler, accompanied by Ribbentrop, set out in his
Special Train for southern France, bound first of all for a meeting,
two days later, with Pierre Laval, Pétain’s deputy and foreign
minister in the Vichy regime. This proved encouraging. Laval, full
of unctuous humility, opened up the prospect of close French
collaboration with Germany, hoping for France’s reward through
retention of its African possessions and release from heavy
reparations — both at the expense of Great Brtain — once a peace-
settlement could be concluded. Hitler did not seek firm details.
Leaving no doubt that some African possessions would fall to
Germany after the war, he was content to offer the inducement that
the ease of terms for France would depend on the extent of French
cooperation and the rapidity with which the defeat of Britain could
be attained.

Hitler’s train travelled on to Hendaye, on the Spanish border, for
the meeting with the Caudillo on the 23rd. From Hitler’s point of
view, the meeting was purely exploratory. The next day, as

arranged with Laval, he would be talking with Pétain in the same
vein. The repulsing by Vichy forces of a British-Gaullist landing at
Dakar, the French West African port, a month earlier, and attempt
to seize West Africa encouraged the already existing inclination of
Hitler and Ribbentrop towards France over Spain if the respective
interests of the two could not be reconciled. Hitler knew that his
military chiefs were opposed to attempts to bring Spain into the
war, and that Weizsacker had also strongly advised that there was
‘no practical worth’ in Spain joining the Axis. From Franco’s angle,
the aim was not to keep Spain out of the war but to make maximum
gains from her entry. In effect, Hitler had little or nothing to offer
Franco, who wanted a great deal. The contours were set for the
difficult meeting to follow.

It took place in the salon of Hitler’s train. Franco — little, fat,
swarthy in complexion, his droning sing-song voice reminiscent, it
was later said, of that of an Islamic prayer-caller — said Spain would
gladly fight on the side of Germany during the current war, though
the economic difficulties of the country ruled this out. Unmistakably
and disappointingly to Spanish ears, however, Hitler spent much of
his rambling address dampening down any hopes Franco might have
had of major territorial gains at minimal cost. It became ever
plainer that he had little concrete to offer Spain. He proposed an
alliance, with Spanish entry into the war in January 1941, to be
rewarded by Gibraltar. But it was evident that none of the colonial
territory in North Africa, coveted by Franco, was earmarked for
Spain in Hitler’s thinking. The Spanish dictator said nothing for a
while. Then he unfolded his list of exorbitant demands of foodstuffs
and armaments. At one point, Hitler’s irritation was so great that he
got up from the table, stating that there was no point in continuing.
But he calmed down and carried on. The talks produced, however,
no more than an empty agreement, leaving the Spanish to decide
when, if ever, they would join the Axis. Hitler was heard to mutter,
as he left the meeting: ‘There’s nothing to be done with this chap.’
At Florence a few days later, Hitler told Mussolini that he ‘would

prefer to have three or four teeth taken out’ than go through
another nine hours’ discussion with Franco.

The discussions with Pétain and Laval in Montoire on 24 October
were no more fruitful. Hitler sought France’s cooperation in the
‘community’ of countries he was in the process of organizing against
Britain. The aged leader of Vichy France was non-committal. He
could confirm the principle of French collaboration with Germany,
which Laval had agreed at his meeting with Hitler two days earlier,
but could not enter into detail and needed to consult his
government before undertaking a binding arrangement. Hitler had
offered Pétain nothing specific. He had in return received no precise
assurances of active French support, either in the fight against
Britain or in steps to regain the territory lost in French Equatorial
Africa to the ‘Free French’ of de Gaulle, allied with Britain. The
outcome was therefore inconsequential.

It was not surprising that Hitler and Ribbentrop travelled back to
Germany with a sense of disappointment at the hesitancy of the
French. It was a slow journey, during which Hitler, dispirited and
convinced that his initial instincts had been right, told Keitel and
Jodl that he wanted to move against Russia during the summer of
1941.

On crossing the German border Hitler received news that did
nothing to improve his mood. He was informed that the Italians
were about to invade Greece. He was furious at the stupidity of
such a military action to take place in the autumn rains and winter
snows of the Balkan hills.

However, during the meeting of the two dictators and their
foreign ministers in Florence on 28 October - essentially a report on
the negotiations with Franco and Pétain — Hitler contained his
feelings about the Italian Greek adventure, and the meeting passed
in harmony. Hitler spoke of the mutual distrust between himself
and Stalin. However, he said, Molotov would shortly be coming to
Berlin. It was his intention, he added, to steer Russian energies
towards India. This remarkable idea was Ribbentrop’s — part of his
scheme to establish spheres of influence for Germany, Italy, Japan,

and Russia (the powers forming his intended European—Asiatic Bloc
to ‘stretch from Japan to Spain’). It was an idea with a very short
lifetime.

Briefing his military leaders in early November on his
negotiations with Franco and Pétain, Hitler had referred to Russia
as ‘the entire problem of Europe’ and said ‘everything must be done
to be ready for the great showdown’. But the meeting with his top
brass showed that decisions on the prosecution of the war, whether
it should be in the east or the west, were still open. Hitler had
seemed to his army adjutant Major Engel, attending the meeting,
‘visibly depressed’, conveying the ‘impression that at the moment he
does not know how things should proceed’. Molotov’s visit in all
probability finally convinced Hitler that the only way forward left
to him was the one which he had, since the summer, come to favour
on strategic grounds, and to which he was in any case ideologically
inclined: an attack on the Soviet Union.

Relations with the Soviet Union were already deteriorating
seriously by the time Molotov had been invited to Berlin. Soviet
designs on parts of Romania (which had been forced earlier in the
summer to cede Bessarabia and northern Bukovina) and on Finland
(effectively a Soviet satellite following defeat in the recent war) had
prompted direct German involvement in these areas. Anxious about
the Ploesti oil-fields, Hitler had agreed in September to Marshal
Antonescu’s request to send a German military mission comprising a
number of armoured divisions and air-force units to Romania, on
the face of it to reorganize the Romanian army. Russian protests
that the German guarantees of Romania’s frontiers violated the
1939 pact were dismissed. In late November Romania came fully
within the German orbit when she joined the Tripartite Pact. The
German stance on Finland had altered at the end of July — the time
that an attack on the Soviet Union had first been mooted. Arms
deliveries were made and agreements allowing German troops
passage to Norway were signed, again despite Soviet protests.
Meanwhile, the number of German divisions on the eastern front

had been increased to counter the military build-up along the
southern borders of the Soviet Union.

Undaunted by the growing difficulties in German-Soviet
relations, Ribbentrop impressed upon the more sceptical Hitler the
opportunities to build the anti-British continental bloc through
including the Soviet Union, too, in the Tripartite Pact. Hitler
indicated that he was prepared to see what came of the idea. But on
the very day that talks with Molotov began, he put out a directive
that, irrespective of the outcome, ‘all already orally ordered
preparations for the east [were] to be continued’.

The invitation to Molotov had been sent on 13 October — before
the fruitless soundings of Franco and Pétain were made. On the
morning of 12 November Molotov and his entourage arrived in
Berlin. Weizsacker thought the shabbily dressed Russians looked
like extras in a gangster film. The hammer and sickle on Soviet flags
fluttering alongside swastika banners provided an extraordinary
spectacle in the Reich’s capital. But the Internationale was not
played, apparently to avoid the possibility of Berliners, still familiar
with the words, joining in. The negotiations, in Ribbentrop’s study
in the lavishly redesigned old Reich President’s Palace, went badly
from the start. Molotov, cold eyes alert behind a wire pince-nez, an
occasional icy smile flitting across his chess-player’s face, reminded
Paul Schmidt - there to keep a written record of the discussions — of
his old mathematics teacher. His pointed, precise remarks and
questions posed a stark contrast to Ribbentrop’s pompous, long-
winded statements. He let Ribbentrop’s initial comments, that
Britain was already defeated, pass without comment. And he made
little response to the German Foreign Minister’s strong hints in the
opening exchanges that the Soviet Union should direct her
territorial interests towards the Persian Gulf, the Middle East, and
India (plainly indicated, but not mentioned by name). But when
Hitler joined the talks for the afternoon session, and provided his
usual grand sweep of strategic interests, Molotov unleashed a hail
of precise questions about Finland, the Balkans, the Tripartite Pact,
and the proposed spheres of influence in Asia, catching the German

leader off guard. Hitler was visibly discomfited, and sought a
convenient adjournment.

Molotov had not finished. He began the next day where he had
left off the previous afternoon. He did not respond to Hitler’s
suggestion to look to the south, and to the spoils of the British
Empire. He was more interested, he said, in matters of obvious
European significance. He pressed Hitler on German interests in
Finland, which he saw as contravening the 1939 Pact, and on the
border guarantee given to Romania and the military mission sent
there. Molotov asked how Germany would react were the Soviet
Union to act in the same way towards Bulgaria. Hitler could only
reply, unconvincingly, that he would have to consult Mussolini.
Molotov indicated Soviet interest in Turkey, giving security in the
Dardanelles and an outlet to the Aegean.

Symbolizing the fiasco of the two-day negotiations, the closing
banquet in the Soviet Embassy ended in disarray under the wail of
air-raid sirens. In his private bunker, Ribbentrop — showing once
more his unerring instinct for clumsiness — pulled a draft agreement
from his pocket and made one last vain attempt to persuade
Molotov to concur in a four-power division of a large proportion of
the globe. Molotov coldly reasserted Soviet interest in the Balkans
and the Baltic, not the Indian Ocean. The questions that interested
the Soviet Union, went on Molotov, somewhat more expansively
than during the actual negotiations, were not only Turkey and
Bulgaria, and the fate of Romania and Hungary, but also Axis
intentions in Yugoslavia, Greece, and Poland. The Soviet
government also wanted to know about the German stance on
Swedish neutrality. Then there was the question of outlets to the
Baltic. Later in the month, Molotov told the German Ambassador in
Moscow, Graf von der Schulenburg, that Soviet terms for agreeing
to a four-power pact included the withdrawal of German troops
from Finland, recognition of Bulgaria as within the Russian sphere
of influence, the granting of bases in Turkey, acceptance of Soviet
expansion towards the Persian Gulf, and the cession by Japan of
southern Sakhalin.

Molotov listed these terms on 26 November. Hitler did not need
to wait so long. He viewed the talks in Berlin, he had told his army
adjutant Major Engel before Molotov came to the Reich capital, as a
test of whether Germany and the Soviet Union would stand ‘back to
back or breast to breast’. The results of the ‘test’ were now plain, in
Hitler’s eyes. The two-day negotiations with Molotov had sufficed
to show that irreconcilable territorial interests of Germany and the
Soviet Union meant inevitable clashes in the near future. Hitler told
Engel that he had in any case expected nothing from Molotov’s
visit. ‘The talks had shown where the Russian plans were heading.
M[olotov] had let the cat out of the bag. He (F[threr]) was really
relieved. It would not even remain a marriage of convenience.
Letting the Russians into Europe meant the end of central Europe.
The Balkans and Finland were also dangerous flanks.’

Hitler’s conviction, hardening since the summer, was confirmed:
the strike against the Soviet Union had to take place in 1941. Some
time in the autumn, probably following Molotov’s visit, he sent his
adjutants to search out a suitable location for field headquarters in
the east. They recommended a spot in East Prussia, near
Rastenburg, and he gave Todt orders to begin construction and have
the headquarters completed by April. On 3 December he
congratulated Field-Marshal Fedor von Bock on his sixtieth birthday
and told him that the ‘Eastern Question is becoming acute’. He
spoke of rumoured links between Russia and America, and Russia
and England. To await developments was dangerous. But if the
Russians were eliminated from the equation, British hopes of
defeating Germany on the continent would vanish, and Japanese
freedom from worries about a Soviet attack from the rear meant
American intervention would be made more difficult.

Two days later, on 5 December, he reviewed the objectives of the
planned attack on the Soviet Union with Brauchitsch and Halder.
Soviet ambitions in the Balkans, he declared, were a source of
potential problems for the Axis. ‘The decision concerning hegemony
in Europe will come in the battle against Russia,’ he added. ‘The
Russian is inferior. The army lacks leadership.’ The German

advantage in terms of leadership, matériel, and troops would be at
its greatest in the spring. ‘When the Russian army is battered once,’
continued Hitler, in his crass underestimation of Soviet forces, ‘the
final disaster is unavoidable.’ The aim of the campaign, he stated,
was the ‘crushing of Russian manpower’. The key strikes were to be
on the northern and southern flanks. Moscow, he commented, was
‘of no great importance’. Preparations for the campaign were to be
advanced in full force. The operation was expected to take place at
the end of May. Halder reported Hitler’s thoughts to a meeting of
military leaders on 13 December. The campaign, he told them,
would involve the launching of 130-140 divisions against the Soviet
Union by spring 1941. There was no indication that Brauchitsch,
Halder, or their subordinate commanders raised objections to
Hitler’s analysis. On 17 December Hitler summarized his strategy
for Jodl by emphasizing ‘that we must solve all continental
European problems in 1941 since the USA would be in a position to
intervene from 1942 onwards’.

The following day, 18 December 1940, Hitler’s war directive No.
21 began: ‘The German Wehrmacht must be prepared, also before
the ending of the war against England, to crush Soviet Russia in a
rapid campaign.’

The operation had been code-named ‘Otto’ by the General Staff. It
had been referred to as ‘Fritz’ by the Wehrmacht operational staff,
and the draft directive No. 21 laid before Jodl on 12 December had
carried that name. When Jodl presented it to him five days later,
Hitler changed the code-name to the more imperious ‘Barbarossa’ —
an allusion to the mighty twelfth-century emperor, ruler of
Germany’s first Reich, who had dominated central Europe and led a
crusade against the Infidel. Hitler was now ready to plan his own
crusade, against Bolshevism.

On 8-9 January 1941 Hitler held discussions at the Berghof with
his military leaders. On the reasons for deciding to attack the Soviet
Union, he reiterated arguments he had been deploying since the
previous summer. Partly, the argument rested on an understanding
of Soviet intentions, sharpened since Molotov’s visit. Stalin was

shrewd, said Hitler, and would increasingly exploit Germany’s
difficulties. But the crux of his case was, as ever, the need to pull
away what he saw as a vital prop to British interests. ‘The
possibility of a Russian intervention in the war was sustaining the
English,’ he went on. ‘They would only give up the contest if this
last continental hope were demolished.’ He did not think ‘the
English were crazy. If they saw no further chance of winning the
war, they would stop fighting, since losing it would mean they no
longer had the power to hold together the Empire. Were they able
to hold out, could put together forty to fifty divisions, and the USA
and Russia were to help them, a very difficult situation for Germany
would arise. That must not happen. Up to now he had acted on the
principle of always smashing the most important enemy positions to
advance a step. Therefore Russia must now be smashed. Either the
British would then give in, or Germany would continue the fight
against Britain in most favourable circumstances.’ “The smashing of
Russia,’ added Hitler, ‘would also allow Japan to turn with all its
might against the USA’, hindering American intervention. He
pointed to further advantages for Germany. The army in the east
could be substantially reduced in size, allowing greater deployment
of the armaments industry for the navy and Luftwaffe. ‘Germany
would then be unassailable. The gigantic territory of Russia
contained immeasurable riches. Germany had to dominate it
economically and politically, though not annex it. It would then
preside over all possibilities of waging the struggle against
continents in future. It could then not be defeated by anyone. If the
operation were carried through,’ Hitler concluded, ‘Europe would
hold its breath.’ If the generals listening had any reservations, they
did not voice them.

During 1940 the twin obsessions of Hitler — ‘removing the Jews’,
and Lebensraum — had come gradually into sharp focus. Now, in the
first half of 1941, the practical preparations for the showdown that
Hitler had always wanted could be made. In these months the twin
obsessions would merge into each other. The decisive steps into
genocidal war were about to be taken.

19
Designing a ‘War of Annihilation’

Between January and March 1941 the operational plans for
‘Barbarossa’ were put in place and approved by Hitler. Outwardly
confident, he was inwardly less certain. On the very day that the
directive for the attack on the Soviet Union was issued to the
commanders-in-chief of the Wehrmacht, 18 December 1940, Major
Engel had told Brauchitsch (who was still unclear whether Hitler
was bluffing about invading the USSR) that the Fuhrer was unsure
how things would go. He was distrustful of his own military
leaders, uncertain about the strength of the Russians, and
disappointed in the intransigence of the British. Hitler’s lack of
confidence in the operational planning of the army leadership was
not fully assuaged in the first months of 1941. His intervention in
the planning stage brought early friction with Halder, and led by
mid-March to amendments of some significance in the detailed
directives for the invasion.

Already by the beginning of February, Hitler had been made
aware of doubts — at any rate a mood less than enthusiastic - among
some of the army leaders about the prospects of success in the
coming campaign. General Thomas had presented to the Army High
Command a devastating overview of deficiencies in supplies. Halder
had noted in his diary on 28 January the gist of his discussion with
Brauchitsch early that afternoon about ‘Barbarossa’: ‘The “purpose”
is not clear. We do not hit the British that way. Our economic
potential will not be substantially improved. Risk in the west must
not be underestimated. It is possible that Italy might collapse after
the loss of her colonies, and we get a southern front in Spain, Italy,

and Greece. If we are then tied up in Russia, a bad situation will be
made worse.’ Misgivings were voiced by the three army group
commanders, Field-Marshals von Leeb, von Bock, and von
Rundstedt, when they lunched with Brauchitsch and Halder on 31
January. Brauchitsch, as usual, was reluctant to voice any concern
to Hitler. Bock, however, tentatively did so on 1 February. He
thought the German army ‘would defeat the Russians if they stood
and fought’. But he doubted whether it would be possible to force
them to accept peace-terms. Hitler was dismissive. The loss of
Leningrad, Moscow, and the Ukraine would compel the Russians to
give up the fight. If not, the Germans would press on beyond
Moscow to Ekaterinburg. War production, Hitler went on, was
equal to any demands. There was an abundance of matériel. The
economy was thriving. The armed forces had more manpower than
was available at the start of the war. Bock did not feel it even worth
suggesting that it was still possible to back away from the conflict.
‘T will fight,’ Hitler stated. ‘I am convinced that our attack will
sweep over them like a hailstorm.’

Halder pulled his punches at a conference with Hitler on 3
February. He brought up supply difficulties, but pointed to methods
by which they could be overcome, and played down the risks that
he had been emphasizing only days earlier. The army leaders
accepted the priority Hitler gave to the capture of Leningrad and
the Baltic coast over Moscow. But they neglected to work out in
sufficient detail the consequences of such a strategy. Hitler was
informed of the numerical superiority of the Russian troops and
tanks. But he thought little of their quality. Everything depended
upon rapid victories in the first days, and the securing of the Baltic
and the southern flank as far as Rostov. Moscow, as he had
repeatedly stressed, could wait. According to Below, Brauchitsch
and Halder ‘accepted Hitler’s directives to wage war against Russia
without a single word of objection or opposition’.

In the days that followed the meeting, General Thomas produced
further bleak prognoses of the economic situation. Fuel for vehicles
sufficed for two months, aircraft fuel till autumn, rubber production

until the end of March. Thomas asked Keitel to pass on his report to
Hitler. Keitel told him that the Fuhrer would not permit himself to
be influenced by economic difficulties. Probably, the report never
even reached Hitler. In any case, if Thomas was trying through
presentation of dire economic realities to deter Hitler, his method
was guaranteed to backfire. A further report demonstrated that if
quick victories were attained, and the Caucasus oil-fields acquired,
Germany could gain 75 per cent of the materials feeding the Soviet
war industry. Such a prognosis could only serve as encouragement
to Hitler and to other Nazi leaders.

Hitler remained worried about a number of aspects of the OKH’s
planning. He was concerned that the army leadership was
underestimating the dangers from Soviet strikes at the German
flanks from the Pripet Marsh, and called in February for a detailed
study to allow him to draw his own conclusions. In mid-March, he
contradicted the General Staff ’s conclusions, asserting — rightly, as
things turned out — that the Pripet Marsh was no hindrance to army
movement. He also thought the existing plan would leave the
German forces overstretched, and too dependent upon what he
regarded as the dubious strength of the Romanian, Hungarian, and
Slovak divisions — the last of these dismissed merely on the grounds
that they were Slavs — on the southern front. He ordered, therefore,
the alteration from a two-pronged advance of Army Group South to
a single thrust towards Kiev and down the Dnieper. Finally, he
repeated his insistence that the crucial objective had to be to secure
Leningrad and the Baltic, not push on to Moscow, which, at a
meeting with his military leaders on 17 March, he declared was
‘completely immaterial’. At this conference, these alterations to the
original operational plan were accepted by Brauchitsch and Halder
without demur. With that, the military framework for the invasion
was in all its essentials finalized.

While the preparations for the great offensive were taking shape,
however, Hitler was preoccupied with the dangerous situation that
Mussolini’s ill-conceived invasion of Greece the previous October

had produced in the Balkans, and with remedying the consequence
of Italian military incompetence in North Africa.

In all, during the calamitous month of January, the fighting in
Libya had seen some 130,000 Italians captured by the British. The
likelihood of a complete rout for the Italians in North Africa had to
be faced. By 6 February, Hitler was briefing the general he had
selected to stop the British advance and hold Tripolitania for the
Axis. This was Erwin Rommel, who, with a combination of tactical
brilliance and bluff, would throughout the second half of 1941 and
most of 1942 turn the tables on the British and keep them at bay in
North Africa.

Hitler’s hopes of a vital strategic gain in the Mediterranean —
notably affecting the situation in North Africa — by the acquisition of
Gibraltar were, however, to be dashed again by the obstinacy of
General Franco. Already at the end of January, Hitler had been
informed by Jodl that ‘Operation Felix’ — the planned assault on
Gibraltar — would have to be shelved, since the earliest it could now
take place would be in mid-April. The troops and weapons would by
then be needed for ‘Barbarossa’, at that time scheduled for a
possible start only a month later. Hitler still hoped that Mussolini,
at his meeting on 12 February with Franco, might persuade the
Caudillo to enter the war. The day before the meeting, Hitler sent
Franco a personal letter, exhorting him to join forces with the Axis
powers and to recognize ‘that in such difficult times not so much
wise foresight as a bold heart can rescue the nations’. Franco was
unimpressed. He repeated Spanish demands on Morocco, as well as
Gibraltar. And he put forward in addition, as a price for Spain’s
entering the war at some indeterminate date, such extortionate
demands for grain supplies — saying the 100,000 tons already
promised by the Germans were sufficient for only twenty days —
that there was no possibility they would be met. Spain, as before,
had to be left out of the equation.

Hitler confirmed the ‘dreadful conditions’ in Spain which Goebbels
reported to him the day after his big speech in the Sportpalast on 30
January 1941, to mark the eighth anniversary of his appointment as
Chancellor. The Propaganda Minister found Hitler in high spirits,
confident that Germany held the strategic initiative, convinced of
victory, revitalized as always by the wild enthusiasm — like a drug
to him — of the vast crowd of raucous admirers packed into the
Sportpalast. ‘I’ve seldom seen him like this in recent times,’
Goebbels remarked. ‘The Ftihrer always impresses me afresh,’ he
added. ‘He is a true Leader, an inexhaustible giver of strength.’

In his speech, Hitler had concentrated almost exclusively on
attacking Britain. He did not devote a single syllable to Russia. But
for the first time since the beginning of the war, he reiterated his
threat ‘that, if the rest of the world should be plunged into a general
war through Jewry, the whole of Jewry will have played out its
role in Europe!’ ‘They can still laugh today about it,’ he added,
menacingly, ‘just like they used to laugh at my prophecies. The
coming months and years will prove that here, too, I’ve seen things
correctly.’ Hitler had made this threat, in similar tones, in his
Reichstag speech of 30 January 1939. In repeating it now, he
claimed to recall making his ‘prophecy’ in his speech to the
Reichstag at the outbreak of war. But, in fact, he had not mentioned
the Jews in his Reichstag speech on 1 September, the day of the
invasion of Poland. He would make the same mistake in dating on
several other occasions in the following two years. It was an
indication, subconscious or more probably intentional, that he
directly associated the war with the destruction of the Jews.

Why did he repeat the threat at this juncture? There was no
obvious contextual need for it. He had referred earlier in the speech
to ‘a certain Jewish-international capitalist clique’, but otherwise
had not played the antisemitic tune. But within the few weeks
immediately prior to his speech, Hitler had had the fate of the Jews
on his mind, commissioning Heydrich at this point with the task of
developing a new plan, replacing the defunct Madagascar scheme,
to deport the Jews from the German sphere of domination. Perhaps

Hitler had harboured his ‘prophecy’ in the recesses of his mind since
he had originally made it. Perhaps one of his underlings had
reminded him of it. But, most probably, it was the inclusion of the
extract from his speech in the propaganda film Der ewige Jude,
which had gone on public release in November 1940, that had
stirred Hitler’s memory of his earlier comment. Whatever had done
so, the repeat of the ‘prophecy’ at this point was ominous. Though
he was uncertain precisely how the war would bring about the
destruction of European Jewry, he was sure that this would be the
outcome. And this was only a matter of months before the war
against the arch-enemy of ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’ was to be launched.
The idea of the war to destroy the Jews once and for all was
beginning to take concrete shape in Hitler’s mind.

According to the account — post-war recollections, resting partly
on earlier, lost notes in diary form — of his army adjutant Gerhard
Engel, Hitler discussed the ‘Jewish Question’ soon after his speech,
on 2 February, with a group of his intimates. Keitel, Bormann, Ley,
Speer, and Ribbentrop’s right-hand man and liaison officer Walther
Hewel were present. Ley brought up the topic of the Jews. This was
the trigger for Hitler to expound at length on his thoughts. He
envisaged the war accelerating a solution. But it also created
additional difficulties. Originally, it had lain within his reach ‘to
break the Jewish power at most in Germany’. He had thought at
one time, he said, with the assistance of the British of deporting the
half a million German Jews to Palestine or Egypt. But that idea had
been blocked by diplomatic objections. Now it had to be the aim ‘to
exclude Jewish influence in the entire area of power of the Axis’. In
some countries, like Poland and Slovakia, the Germans themselves
could bring that about. In France, it had become more complicated
following the armistice, and was especially important there. He
spoke of approaching France and demanding the island of
Madagascar to accommodate Jewish resettlement. When an
evidently incredulous Bormann — aware, no doubt, that the
Madagascar Plan had by now been long since shelved by the
Foreign Ministry and, more importantly, by the Reich Security Head

Office — asked how this could be done during the war, Hitler replied
vaguely that he would like to make the whole ‘Strength through
Joy’ fleet (ships belonging to the German Labour Front’s leisure
programme) available for the task, but feared its exposure to enemy
submarines. Then, in somewhat contradictory fashion, he added: ‘He
was now thinking about something else, not exactly more friendly.’

This cryptic comment was a hint that the defeat of the Soviet
Union, anticipated to take only a few months, would open up the
prospect of wholesale deportation of the Jews to the newly
conquered lands in the east — and forced labour under barbarous
conditions in the Pripet marshlands (stretching towards White
Russia in what were formerly eastern parts of Poland) and in the
frozen, arctic wastes in the north of the Soviet Union. Such ideas
were being given their first airing around this time by Himmler,
Heydrich, and Eichmann. They would not have hesitated in putting
their ideas to Hitler. The thinking was now moving way beyond
what had been contemplated under the Madagascar Plan, inhumane
though that itself had been. In such an inhospitable climate as that
now envisaged, the fate of the Jews would be sealed. Within a few
years most of them would starve, freeze, or be worked to death.
The idea of a comprehensive territorial solution to the ‘Jewish
problem’ had by now become effectively synonymous with
genocide.

Hitler had been under continued pressure from Nazi leaders to
deport the Jews from their own territories, with, now as before, the
General Government seen as the favoured ‘dumping-ground’.
Among the most persistent was the Gauleiter of Vienna, and former
Hitler Youth Leader, Baldur von Schirach, who had been pressing
hard since the previous summer to relieve the chronic housing
problems of Vienna by ‘evacuating’ the city’s 60,000 Jews to the
General Government. Hitler had finally agreed to this in December
1940. The plans were fully prepared by the beginning of February
1941. Fresh from his visit to Vienna in March, on the third
anniversary of the Anschluf$, Hitler discussed with Hans Frank and
Goebbels the imminent removal of the Jews from Vienna. Goebbels,

anxious to be rid of the Jews from Berlin, was placated with an
indication that the Reich capital would be next. ‘Later, they must
sometime get out of Europe altogether,’ the Propaganda Minister
added.

Despite the problems which had arisen in 1940 about the transfer
of Jews and Poles into the General Government, Heydrich (partly
under pressure from the Wehrmacht, which needed land for troop
exercises) had approved in January 1941 a new plan to expel
771,000 Poles together with the 60,000 Jews from Vienna (bowing
to the demands for deportation from Schirach, backed by Hitler)
into Hans Frank’s domain to make room for the settlement of ethnic
Germans. A major driving-force behind the urgency of the ambitious
new resettlement programme was the need to accommodate (and
incorporate in the work-force) ethnic Germans who had been
brought to Poland from Lithuania, Bessarabia, Bukovina and
elsewhere in eastern Europe and since then miserably housed in
transit camps. Frank’s subordinates were dismayed at having to
cope with a massive new influx of ‘undesirables’. In the event,
however, inevitable logistical complications of the new plan soon
revealed it as a grandiose exercise in inhumane lunacy. By mid-
March the programme had ground to a halt. Only around 25,000
people had been deported into the General Government. And only
some 5,000, mainly elderly, Jews had been removed from Vienna.
There was still no prospect, within the confines of the territory
currently under German control, of attaining either the
comprehensive resettlement programme that Himmler was striving
for, or, within that programme, solving what seemed to be
becoming a more and more intractable problem: removing the
Jews.

From comments made by Eichmann’s associate Theodor
Dannecker, and, subsequently, by Eichmann himself, it was around
the turn of the year 1940-41 that Heydrich gained approval from
Hitler for his proposal for the ‘final evacuation’ of German Jews to
a ‘territory still to be determined’. On 21 January Dannecker noted:
‘In accordance with the will of the Fuhrer, the Jewish question

within the part of Europe ruled or controlled by Germany is after
the war to be subjected to a final solution.’ To this end, Heydrich
had obtained from Hitler, via Himmler and Goring, the ‘commission
to put forward a final solution project’. Plainly, at this stage, this
was still envisaged as a territorial solution — a replacement for the
aborted Madagascar Plan. Eichmann had in mind a figure of around
5.8 million persons.

Two months later, Eichmann told representatives of the
Propaganda Ministry that Heydrich ‘had been commissioned with
the final evacuation of the Jews’ and had put forward a proposal to
that effect some eight to ten weeks earlier. The proposal had,
however, not been accepted ‘because the General Government was
not in a position at that time to absorb a single Jew or a Pole’.
When, on 17 March, Hans Frank visited Berlin to speak privately
with Hitler about the General Government — presumably raising the
difficulties he was encountering with Heydrich’s new deportation
scheme — he was reassured, in what amounted to a reversal of
previous policy, that the General Government would be the first
territory to be made free of Jews. But only three days after this
meeting, Eichmann was still talking of Heydrich presiding over the
‘final evacuation of the Jews’ into the General Government.
Evidently (at least that was the line that Eichmann was holding to),
Heydrich still at this point had his sights set on the General
Government as offering the temporary basis for a territorial solution.
Frank was refusing to contemplate this. And Hitler had now opened
up to him the prospect of his territory being the first to be rid of its
Jews. Perhaps this was said simply to placate Frank. But in the light
of the ideas already taking shape for a comprehensive new
territorial solution in the lands, soon to be conquered (it was
presumed), of the Soviet Union, it was almost certainly a further
indicator that Hitler was now envisaging a new option for a radical
solution to the ‘Jewish problem’ once the war was over by mass
deportation to the east.

Heydrich and his boss Himmler were certainly anxious to press
home the opportunity to expand their own power-base on a grand

scale by exploiting the new potential about to open up in the east.
Himmler had lost no time in acquainting himself with Hitler’s
thinking and, no doubt, taking the chance to advance his own
suggestions. On the very evening of the signing of the military
directive for ‘Operation Barbarossa’ on 18 December, he had made
his way to the Reich Chancellery for a meeting with Hitler. No
record of what was discussed survives. But it is hard to imagine that
Himmler did not raise the issue of new tasks for the SS which would
be necessary in the coming showdown with ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’. It
was a matter of no more at this point than obtaining Hitler’s broad
authority for plans still to be worked out.

Himmler and Heydrich were to be kept busy over the next weeks
in plotting their new empire. Himmler informed a select group of SS
leaders in January that there would have to be a reduction of some
30 million in the Slav population in the East. The Reich Security
Head Office commissioned the same month preparations for
extensive police action. By early February Heydrich had already
carried out preliminary negotiations with Brauchitsch about using
units of the Security Police alongside the army for ‘special tasks’. No
major difficulties were envisaged.

Ill

What such ‘special tasks’ might imply became increasingly clear to a
wider circle of those initiated into the thinking for ‘Barbarossa’
during February and March. On 26 February General Georg
Thomas, the Wehrmacht’s economics expert, learned from Goring
that an early objective during the occupation of the Soviet Union
was ‘quickly to finish off the Bolshevik leaders’. A week later, on 3
March, Jodl’s comments on the draft of operational directions for
‘Barbarossa’ which had been routinely sent to him made this
explicit: ‘all Bolshevist leaders or commissars must be liquidated
forthwith’. Jodl had altered the draft somewhat before showing it to
Hitler. He now summarized Hitler’s directions for the ‘final version’.
These made plain that ‘the forthcoming campaign is more than just

an armed conflict; it will lead, too, to a showdown between two
different ideologies ... The socialist ideal can no longer be wiped
out in the Russia of today. From the internal point of view the
formation of new states and governments must inevitably be based
on this principle. The Jewish-Bolshevik intelligentsia, as the
“oppressor” of the people up to now, must be eliminated.’ The task
involved, the directions went on, was ‘so difficult that it cannot be
entrusted to the army’. Jodl had the draft retyped in double-spacing
to allow Hitler to make further alterations. When the redrafted
version was finally signed by Keitel on 13 March, it specified that
‘the Reichsfiihrer-SS has been given by the Fuhrer certain special
tasks within the operations zone of the army’, though there was
now no direct mention of the liquidation of the ‘Bolshevik-Jewish
intelligentsia’ or the ‘Bolshevik leaders and commissars’.

Even so, the troops were to be directly instructed about the need
to deal mercilessly with the political commissars and Jews they
encountered. When he met Goring on 26 March, to deal with a
number of issues related to the activities of the police in the eastern
campaign, Heydrich was told that the army ought to have a three-
to four-page set of directions ‘about the danger of the GPU-
Organization, the political commissars, Jews etc., so that they
would know whom in practice they had to put up against the wall’.
Goring went on to emphasize to Heydrich that the powers of the
Wehrmacht would be limited in the east, and that Himmler would
be left a great deal of independent authority. Heydrich laid before
Goring his draft proposals for the ‘solution of the Jewish Question’,
which the Reich Marshal approved with minor amendments. These
evidently foresaw the territorial solution, which had been conceived
around the turn of the year, and already approved by Himmler and
Hitler, of deportation of all the European Jews into the wastelands
of the Soviet Union, where they would perish.

During the first three months of 1941, then, the ideological
objectives of the attack on the Soviet Union had come sharply into
prominence, and had largely been clarified. In the context of the
imminent showdown, the barbarism was now adopting forms and

dimensions never previously encountered, even in the experimental
training-ground of occupied Poland.

In the fateful advance into the regime’s planned murderous policy
in the Soviet Union, the army leaders were complicitous. On 17
March, Halder noted comments made that day by Hitler: ‘The
intelligentsia put in by Stalin must be exterminated. The controlling
machinery of the Russian Empire must be smashed. In Great Russia
force must be used in its most brutal form.’ Hitler said nothing here
of any wider policy of ‘ethnic cleansing’. But the army leadership
had two years earlier accepted the policy of annihilating the Polish
ruling-class. Given the depth of its prevalent anti-Bolshevism, it
would have no difficulty in accepting the need for the liquidation of
the Bolshevik intelligentsia. By 26 March, a secret army order laid
down, if in bland terms, the basis of the agreement with the
Security Police authorizing ‘executive measures affecting the civilian
population’. The following day, the Commander-in-Chief of the
army, Field-Marshal von Brauchitsch, announced to his commanders
of the eastern army: “The troops must be clear that the struggle will
be carried out from race to race, and proceed with necessary
severity.’

The army was, therefore, already in good measure supportive of
the strategic aim and the ideological objective of ruthlessly
uprooting and destroying the ‘Jewish-Bolshevik’ base of the Soviet
regime when, on 30 March, in a speech in the Reich Chancellery to
over 200 senior officers, Hitler stated with unmistakable clarity his
views on the coming war with the Bolshevik arch-foe, and what he
expected of his army. This was not the time for talk of strategy and
tactics. It was to outline to generals in whom he still had little
confidence the nature of the conflict that they were entering.
According to Halder’s notes, he was forthright: ‘Clash of two
ideologies. Crushing denunciation of Bolshevism, identified with a
social criminality. Communism is an enormous danger for our
future. We must forget the concept of comradeship between
soldiers. A Communist is no comrade before or after the battle. This
is a war of annihilation. If we do not grasp this, we shall still beat

the enemy, but thirty years later we shall again have to fight the
Communist foe. We do not wage war to preserve the enemy.’ He
went on to stipulate the ‘extermination of the Bolshevist commissars
and of the Communist intelligentsia’. ‘We must fight against the
poison of disintegration,’ he continued. ‘This is no job for military
courts. The individual troop commanders must know the issues at
stake. They must be the leaders in this fight ... Commissars and
GPU men,’ he declared, ‘are criminals and must be dealt with as
such.’ The war would be very different from that in the west. ‘In the
east, harshness today means lenience in the future.’ Commanders
had to overcome any personal scruples.

General Warlimont, who was present, recalled ‘that none of those
present availed themselves of the opportunity even to mention the
demands made by Hitler during the morning’. When serving as a
witness in a trial sixteen years after the end of the war, Warlimont,
explaining the silence of the generals, declared that some had been
persuaded by Hitler that Soviet Commissars were not soldiers but
‘criminal villains’. Others — himself included — had, he claimed,
followed the officers’ traditional view that as head of state and
supreme commander of the Wehrmacht Hitler ‘could do nothing
unlawful’.

The day after Hitler’s speech to the generals, 31 March 1941, the
order was given to prepare, in accordance with the intended
conduct of the coming campaign, as he had outlined it, guidelines
for the ‘treatment of political representatives’. Exactly how this
order was given, and by whom, is unclear. Halder presumed, when
questioned after the war, that it came from Keitel: ‘When one has
seen how, dozens of times, Hitler’s most casual observation would
bring the over-zealous Field-Marshal running to the telephone to let
loose all hell, one can easily imagine how a random remark of the
dictator would worry Keitel into believing that it was his duty on
this occasion to give factual expression to the will of the Fuhrer
even before the beginning of hostilities. Then he or one of his
subordinates would have telephoned OKH and asked how matters
stood. If OKH had in fact been asked such a question, they would

naturally have regarded it as a prod in the rear and would have got
moving at once.’ Whether there had been a direct command by
Hitler, or whether — as Halder presumed — Keitel had once more
been ‘working towards the Fuhrer’, the guidelines initiated at the
end of March found their way by 12 May into a formal edict. For
the first time, they laid down in writing explicit orders for the
liquidation of functionaries of the Soviet system. The reasoning
given was that ‘political representatives and leaders (commissars)’
represented a danger since they ‘had clearly proved through their
previous subversive and seditious work that they reject all European
culture, civilization, constitution, and order. They are therefore to
be eliminated.’

This formed part of a set of orders for the conduct of the war in
the east (following from the framework for the war which Hitler
had defined in his speech of 30 March) that were given out by the
High Commands of the Army and Wehrmacht in May and June.
Their inspiration was Hitler. That is beyond question. But they were
put into operative form by leading officers (and their legal
advisers), all avidly striving to implement his wishes.

The first draft of Hitler’s decree of 13 May 1941, the so-called
‘Barbarossa-Decree’, defining the application of military law in the
arena of Operation Barbarossa, was formulated by the legal branch
of the Wehrmacht High Command. The order removed punishable
acts committed by enemy civilians from the jurisdiction of military
courts. Guerrilla fighters were to be peremptorily shot. Collective
reprisals against whole village communities were ordered in cases
where individual perpetrators could not be rapidly identified.
Actions by members of the Wehrmacht against civilians would not
be automatically subject to disciplinary measures, even if normally
coming under the heading of a crime.

The ‘Commissar Order’ itself, dated 6 June, followed on directly
from this earlier order. Its formulation was instigated by the Army
High Command. The ‘Instructions on the Treatment of Political
Commissars’ began: ‘In the struggle against Bolshevism, we must
not assume that the enemy’s conduct will be based on principles of

humanity or of international law. In particular, hate-inspired, cruel,
and inhumane treatment of prisoners can be expected on the part of
all grades of political commissars, who are the real leaders of
resistance ... To show consideration to these elements during this
struggle, or to act in accordance with international rules of war, is
wrong and endangers both our own security and the rapid
pacification of conquered territory ... Political commissars have
initiated barbaric, Asiatic methods of warfare. Consequently, they
will be dealt with immediately and with maximum severity. As a
matter of principle, they will be shot at once, whether captured
during operations or otherwise showing resistance.’

This did not reflect the imposition of Hitler’s will on a reluctant
army. In part, the army leadership’s rapid compliance in translating
Hitler’s ideological imperatives into operative decrees was in order
to demonstrate its political reliability and avoid losing ground to
the SS, as had happened during the Polish campaign. But the
grounds for the eager compliance went further than this. In the
descent into barbarity the experience in Poland had been a vital
element. Eighteen months’ involvement in the brutal subjugation of
the Poles — even if the worst atrocities were perpetrated by the SS,
the sense of disgust at these had been considerable, and a few
generals had been bold enough to protest about them — had helped
prepare the ground for the readiness to collaborate in the
premeditated barbarism of an altogether different order built into
Operation Barbarossa.

As the full barbarity of the Commissar Order became more
widely known to officers in the weeks immediately prior to the
campaign, there were, here too, honourable exceptions. Leading
officers from Army Group B (to become Army Group Centre),
General Hans von Salmuth and Lieutenant-Colonel Henning von
Tresckow (later a driving-force in plans to kill Hitler), for example,
let it be known confidentially that they would look for ways of
persuading their divisional commanders to ignore the order.
Tresckow commented: ‘If international law is to be broken, then the
Russians, not we, should do it first.’ As the remark indicates, that

the Commissar Order was a breach of international law was plainly
recognized. Field-Marshal Fedor von Bock, Commander of Army
Group Centre, rejected the shooting of partisans and civilian
suspects as incompatible with army discipline, and used this as a
reason to ignore the implementation of the Commissar Order.

But, as Warlimont’s post-war comments acknowledged, at least
part of the officer corps believed Hitler was right that the Soviet
Commissars were ‘criminals’ and should not be treated as ‘soldiers’
in the way that the enemy on the western front had been treated.
Colonel-General Georg von Ktichler, Commander of the 18th Army,
for instance, told his divisional commanders on 25 April that peace
in Europe could only be attained for any length of time through
Germany presiding over territory that secured its food-supply, and
that of other states. Without a showdown with the Soviet Union,
this was unimaginable. In terms scarcely different from those of
Hitler himself, he went on: ‘A deep chasm separates us ideologically
and racially from Russia. Russia is from the very extent of land it
occupies an Asiatic state ... The aim has to be, to annihilate the
European Russia, to dissolve the Russian European state ... The
political commissars and GPU people are criminals. These are the
people who tyrannize the population ... They are to be put on the
spot before a field court and sentenced on the basis of the testimony
of the inhabitants ... This will save us German blood and we will
advance faster.’ Even more categorical was the operational order
for Panzer Group 4, issued by Colonel-General Erich Hoepner (who
three years later would be executed for his part in the plot to kill
Hitler) on 2 May - still before the formulation of the Commissar
Order: ‘The war against the Soviet Union is a fundamental sector of
the struggle for existence of the German people. It is the old
struggle of the Germanic people against Slavdom, the defence of
European culture against Moscovite-Asiatic inundation, the repulse
of Jewish Bolshevism. This struggle has to have as its aim the
smashing of present-day Russia and must consequently be carried
out with unprecedented severity. Every military action must in
conception and execution be led by the iron will mercilessly and

totally to annihilate the enemy. In particular, there is to be no
sparing the upholders of the current Russian-Bolshevik system.’

The complicity of Kichler, Hoepner, and numerous other generals
was built into the way they had been brought up and educated, into
the way they thought. The ideological overlap with the Nazi
leadership was considerable, and is undeniable. There was support
for the creation of an eastern empire. Contempt for Slavs was
deeply ingrained. The hatred of Bolshevism was rife throughout the
officer corps. Antisemitism — though seldom of the outrightly
Hitlerian variety — was also widespread. Together, they blended as
the ideological yeast whose fermentation now easily converted the
generals into accessories to mass murder in the forthcoming eastern
campaign.

In the last week of March, three days before he defined the
character of ‘Operation Barbarossa’ to his generals, Hitler received
some highly unwelcome news with consequences for the planning of
the eastern campaign. He was told of the military coup in Belgrade
that had toppled the government of Prime Minister Cvetkovic and
overthrown the regent, Prince Paul, in favour of his nephew, the
seventeen-year-old King Peter II. Only two days earlier, in a lavish
ceremony on the morning of 25 March in Hitler’s presence in the
palatial surrounds of Schlof$ Belvedere in Vienna, Cvetkovic had
signed Yugoslavia’s adherence to the Tripartite Pact, finally —
following much pressure — committing his country to the side of the
Axis. Hitler regarded this as ‘of extreme importance in connection
with the future German military operations in Greece’. Such an
operation would have been risky, he told Ciano, if Yugoslavia’s
stance had been questionable, with the lengthy communications line
only some twenty kilometres from the Yugoslav border inside
Bulgarian territory. He was much relieved, therefore, although, he
noted, ‘internal relations in Yugoslavia could despite everything
develop in more complicated fashion’. Whatever his forebodings,

Keitel found him a few hours after the signing visibly relieved,
‘happy that no more unpleasant surprises were to be expected in the
Balkans’. It took less than forty-eight hours to shatter this optimism.
The fabric of the Balkan strategy, carefully knitted together over
several months, had been torn apart.

This strategy had aimed at binding the Balkan states, already
closely interlinked economically with the Reich, ever more tightly
to Germany. Keeping the area out of the war would have enabled
Germany to gain maximum economic benefit to serve its military
interests elsewhere. The initial thrust was anti-British, but since
Molotov’s visit to Berlin German policy in the Balkans had
developed an increasingly anti-Soviet tendency.

Mussolini’s reckless invasion of Greece the previous October had
then brought a major revision of objectives. The threat posed by
British military intervention in Greece could not be overlooked. The
Soviet Union could not be attacked as long as danger from the south
was so self-evident. By 12 November Hitler had issued Directive No.
18, ordering the army to make preparations to occupy from
Bulgaria the Greek mainland north of the Aegean should it become
necessary, to enable the Luftwaffe to attack any British air-bases
threatening the Romanian oil-fields. Neither the Luftwaffe nor navy
leadership were satisfied with this, and pressed for the occupation
of the whole of Greece and the Peloponnese. By the end of
November, the Wehrmacht operational staff agreed. Hitler’s
Directive No. 20 of 13 December 1940 for ‘Operation Marita’ still
spoke of the occupation of the Aegean north coast, but now held out
the possibility of occupying the whole of the Greek mainland,
‘should this be necessary’. The intention was to have most of the
troops engaged available ‘for new deployment’ as quickly as
possible.

With the directive for ‘Barbarossa’ following a few days later, it
was obvious what ‘new deployment’ meant. The timing was tight.
Hitler had told Ciano in November that Germany could not
intervene in the Balkans before the spring. ‘Barbarossa’ was
scheduled to begin in May. When unusually bad weather delayed

the complex preparations for ‘Marita’, the timing problems became
more acute. And once Hitler finally decided in March that the
operation had to drive the British from the entire Greek mainland
and occupy it, the campaign had to be both longer and more
extensive than originally anticipated. It was this which caused
Hitler, in opposition to the strongly expressed views of the Army
High Command, to reduce the size of the force initially earmarked
for the southern flank in ‘Barbarossa’.

In the intervening months, strenuous efforts had been made on
the diplomatic front to secure the allegiance of strategically vital
states. Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia had joined the Tripartite
Pact in November 1940. Bulgaria, actively courted by Hitler since
the previous autumn, finally committed itself to the Axis on 1
March. The last piece in the jigsaw was the hardest to fit in:
Yugoslavia. Its geographical position alone made it vital to the
success of an attack on Greece. Here, too, therefore, beginning in
November, every attempt was made to bring about a formal
commitment to the Tripartite Pact. The promise of the Aegean port
of Salonika offered some temptation. The threat of German
occupation — the stick, as always, alongside the carrot — provided
for further concentration of minds. But it was plain that, among the
people of Yugoslavia, allegiance to the Axis would not be a popular
step. Hitler and Ribbentrop put Prince Paul under heavy pressure
when he visited Berlin on 4 March. Despite the fear of internal
unrest, which the Regent emphasized, Prince Paul’s visit paved the
way for the eventual signing of the Tripartite Pact on 25 March. But
within hours of the signing, high-ranking Serbian officers, who had
long resented Croat influence in the government, staged their coup.

Hitler was given the news on the morning of the 27th. He was
outraged. He summoned Keitel and Jodl straight away. He would
never accept this, he shouted, waving the telegram from Belgrade.
He had been betrayed in the most disgraceful fashion and would
smash Yugoslavia whatever the new government promised. There
was still just about time to settle the Balkan issue. But there was
now great urgency. Halder had also been peremptorily summoned

from Zossen. Hitler asked him forthwith how long he needed to
prepare an attack on Yugoslavia. Halder provided on the spot the
rudiments of an invasion plan, which he had devised in the car on
the way from Zossen.

By one o’clock, Hitler was addressing a sizeable gathering of
officers from the army and Luftwaffe. ‘Fithrer is determined,’ ran
the report of the Wehrmacht Operations Staff, ‘... to make all
preparations to smash Yugoslavia militarily and as a state-form.’
Speed was of the essence. He ordered preparations to begin
immediately. The army and Luftwaffe were to indicate their
intended tactics by the evening.

The plans for the invasion of Greece and the build-up to
‘Barbarossa’ were fully revised at breakneck speed to allow for the
preliminary assault on Yugoslavia. The operation was eventually
scheduled to begin in the early hours of 6 April.

The Yugoslav crisis had caused Hitler’s meeting with the hawkish
Japanese Foreign Minister, Yosuke Matsuoka, to be put back a few
hours. It also necessitated Ribbentrop being called away from the
preliminary talks with his Japanese counterpart to attend Hitler’s
briefing. Matsuoka’s visit to Berlin was accompanied by enormous
pomp and circumstance. Every effort was made to impress the
important guest. As usual on state visits, cheering crowds had been
organized — this time waving the little Japanese paper flags that had
been handed out in their thousands. The diminutive Matsuoka,
invariably dwarfed by lanky SS men around him, occasionally
acknowledged the crowd’s applause with a wave of his top-hat.

Hitler placed great store on the visit. His hope — encouraged by
Raeder and Ribbentrop — was to persuade the Japanese to attack
Singapore without delay. With ‘Barbarossa’ imminent, this would tie
up the British in the Far East. The loss of Singapore would be a
catastrophic blow for the still undefeated Britain. This in turn, it
was thought in Berlin, would serve to keep America out of the war.
And any possible rapprochement between Japan and the USA,
wotrying signs of which were mounting, would be ended at one fell
swoop. Hitler sought no military assistance from Japan in the

forthcoming war against the Soviet Union. In fact, he was not
prepared to divulge anything of ‘Barbarossa’ — though in his talks
with Matsuoka earlier that morning Ribbentrop had indicated a
deterioration in Soviet-German relations and strongly hinted at the
possibility that Hitler might attack the Soviet Union at some point.

Hitler deployed his full rhetorical repertoire. But he was sorely
disappointed at Matsuoka’s reply. An attack on Singapore was, the
Japanese Foreign Minister declared, merely a matter of time, and in
his opinion could not come soon enough. But he did not rule Japan,
and his views had not so far prevailed against weighty opposition.
‘At the present moment,’ he stated, ‘he could not under these
circumstances enter on behalf of his Japanese Empire into any
commitment to act.’

It was clear: Hitler had to reckon without any Japanese military
intervention for the foreseeable future. When Matsuoka returned
briefly to Berlin in early April to report on his meeting with
Mussolini, Hitler was prepared to give him every encouragement.
He acceded to the request for technical assistance in submarine
construction. He then made an unsolicited offer. Should Japan ‘get
into’ conflict with the United States, Germany would immediately
‘draw the consequences’. America would seek to pick off her
enemies one by one. ‘Therefore Germany would,’ Hitler said,
‘intervene immediately in case of a conflict Japan-America, for the
strength of the three Pact powers was their common action. Their
weakness would be in letting themselves be defeated singly.’ It was
the thinking that would take Germany into war against the United
States later in the year following the Japanese attack on Pearl
Harbor. Meanwhile, the Soviet-Japanese neutrality pact which
Matsuoka negotiated with Stalin on his way back through Moscow —
ensuring that Japan would not be dragged into a conflict between
Germany and the Soviet Union, and securing her northern flank in
the event of expansion in south-east Asia - came as an unpleasant
surprise to Hitler.

While Matsuoka was in Berlin, preparations for ‘Marita’ were
already furiously taking shape. Within little over a week they were

ready. ‘Operation Marita’ began at 5.20 a.m. on Sunday morning, 6
April. Shortly afterwards, Goebbels read out on the radio the
proclamation Hitler had dictated. By then, hundreds of Luftwaffe
bombers were turning Belgrade into a heap of smoking ruins. Hitler
justified the action to the German people as retaliation against a
‘Serbian criminal clique’ in Belgrade which, in the pay of the British
Secret Service, was attempting, as in 1914, to spread the war in the
Balkans.

With the campaign in its early stages, Hitler left Berlin on the
evening of 10 April, en route for his improvised field headquarters.
These were located in his Special Train Amerika, stationed at the
entrance to a tunnel beneath the Alps on a single-track section of
the line from Vienna to Graz, in a wooded area near Monichkirchen.
The Wehrmacht Operational Staff, apart from Hitler’s closest
advisers, were accommodated in a nearby inn.

Hitler remained in his secluded, heavily guarded field
headquarters for a fortnight. He was visited there by King Boris of
Bulgaria, Admiral Horthy, the regent of Hungary, and Count Ciano
— vultures gathering at the corpse of Yugoslavia. His fifty-second
birthday on 20 April was bizarrely celebrated with a concert in front
of the Special Train, after Goring had eulogized the Fihrer’s genius
as a military commander, and Hitler had shaken the hand of each of
his armed forces’ chiefs. While there Hitler heard the news of the
capitulation of both Yugoslavia and Greece.

After overcoming some early tenacious resistance, the dual
campaign against Yugoslavia and Greece had made unexpectedly
rapid progress. In fact, German operational planning had grossly
overestimated the weak enemy forces. Of the twenty-nine German
divisions engaged in the Balkans, only ten were in action for more
than six days. On 10 April Zagreb was reached, and an independent
Croatian state proclaimed, resting on the slaughterous anti-Serb
Ustasha Movement. Two days later Belgrade was reached. On 17
April the Yugoslav army surrendered unconditionally. Around
344,000 men entered German captivity. Losses on the victors’ side
were a mere 151 dead with 392 wounded and fifteen missing.

In contrast to the punitive attack on Yugoslavia, Hitler’s interest
in the conquest of Greece was purely strategic. He forbade the
bombing of Athens, and regretted having to fight against the
Greeks. If the British had not intervened there (sending troops in
early March to assist the Greek struggle against Mussolini’s forces),
he would never have had to hasten to the help of the Italians, he
told Goebbels. Meanwhile, the German 12th Army had rapidly
advanced over Yugoslav territory on Salonika, which fell on 9 April.
The bulk of the Greek forces capitulated on 21 April. A brief
diplomatic farce followed. The blow to Mussolini’s prestige
demanded that the surrender to the Germans, which had in fact
already taken place, be accompanied by a surrender to the Italians.
To avoid alienating Mussolini, Hitler was forced to comply. The
agreement signed by General List was disowned. Jodl was sent to
Salonika with a new armistice. This time the Italians were party to
it. This was finally signed, amid Greek protests, on 23 April. Greeks
taken prisoner numbered 218,000, British 12,000, against 100 dead
and 3,500 wounded or missing on the German side. In a minor
‘Dunkirk’, the British managed to evacuate 50,000 men — around
four-fifths of its Expeditionary Force, which had to leave behind or
destroy its heavy equipment. The whole campaign had been
completed in under a month.

A follow-up operation to take Crete by landing parachutists was,
while he was in Monichkirchen, somewhat unenthusiastically
conceded by Hitler under pressure from Goring, himself being
pushed by the commander of the parachutist division, General Kurt
Student. By the end of May, this too had proved successful. But it
had been hazardous. And the German losses of 2,071 dead, 2,594
wounded, and 1,888 missing from a deployment of around 22,000
men were far higher than in the entire Balkan campaign. ‘Operation
Mercury’ — the attack on Crete — convinced Hitler that mass
paratroop landings had had their day. He did not contemplate using
them in the assault the following year on Malta. Potentially, the
occupation of Crete offered the prospect of intensified assault on the
British position in the Middle East. Naval High Command tried to

persuade Hitler of this. But his eyes were now turned only in one
direction: towards the East.

On 28 April, Hitler had arrived back in Berlin — for the last time
the warlord returning in triumph from a lightning victory achieved
at minimal cost. Though people in Germany responded in more
muted fashion than they had done to the remarkable victories in the
west, the Balkan campaign appeared to prove once again that their
Leader was a military strategist of genius. His popularity was
undiminished. But there were clouds on the horizon. People in their
vast majority wanted, as they had done all along, peace: victorious
peace, of course, but above all, peace. Their ears pricked up when
Hitler spoke of ‘a hard year of struggle ahead of us’ and, in his
triumphant report to the Reichstag on the Balkan campaign on 4
May, of providing even better weapons for German soldiers ‘next
year’. Their worries were magnified by disturbing rumours of a
deterioration in relations with the Soviet Union and of troops
assembling on the eastern borders of the Reich.

What the mass of the people had, of course, no inkling of was
that Hitler had already put out the directive for the invasion of the
Soviet Union almost five months earlier. That directive, of 18
December, had laid down that preparations requiring longer than
eight weeks should be completed by 15 May. But it had not
stipulated a date for the actual attack. In his speech to military
leaders on 27 March, immediately following news of the Yugoslav
coup, Hitler had spoken of a delay of up to four weeks as a
consequence of the need to take action in the Balkans. Back in
Berlin after his stay in Monichkirchen, he lost no time — assured by
Halder of transport availability to take the troops to the east — in
arranging a new date for the start of ‘Barbarossa’ with Jodl: 22
June.

Towards the end of the war, casting round for scapegoats, Hitler
looked back on the fateful delay as decisive in the failure of the
Russian campaign. ‘If we had attacked Russia already from 15 May
onwards,’ he claimed, ‘... we would have been in a position to
conclude the eastern campaign before the onset of winter.’ This was

simplistic in the extreme — as well as exaggerating the inroads made
by the Balkan campaign on the timing of ‘Barbarossa’. Weather
conditions in an unusually wet spring in central Europe would
almost certainly have ruled out a major attack before June —
perhaps even mid-June. Moreover, the major wear and tear on the
German divisions engaged on the Balkan campaign came less from
the belated inclusion of Yugoslavia than from the invasion of Greece
— planned over many months in conjunction with the planning for
‘Barbarossa’. What did disadvantage the opening of ‘Barbarossa’ was
the need for the redeployment at breakneck speed of divisions that
had pushed on as far as southern Greece and now, without recovery
time, had rapidly to be transported to their eastern positions. In
addition, the damage caused to tanks by rutted and pot-holed roads
in the Balkan hills required a huge effort to equip them again for
the eastern campaign, and probably contributed to the high rate of
mechanical failure during the invasion of Russia. Probably the most
serious effect of the Balkan campaign on planning for ‘Barbarossa’
was the reduction of German forces on the southern flank, to the
south of the Pripet marshes. But we have already seen that Hitler
took the decision to that effect on 17 March, before the coup in
Yugoslavia.

The weaknesses of the plan to invade the Soviet Union could not
be laid at the door of the Italians, for their failure in Greece, or the
Yugoslavs, for what Hitler saw as their treachery. The calamity, as
it emerged, of ‘Barbarossa’ was located squarely in the nature of
German war aims and ambitions. These were by no means solely a
product of Hitler’s ideological obsessiveness, megalomania, and
indomitable willpower. Certainly, he had provided the driving-
force. But he had met no resistance to speak of in the higher
echelons of the regime. The army, in particular, had fully supported
him in the turn to the east. And if Hitler’s underestimation of Soviet
military power was crass, it was an underestimation shared with his
military leaders, who had lost none of their confidence that the war
in the Soviet Union would be over long before winter.

Meanwhile, Hitler was once more forced by events outside his
control, this time close to home, to divert his attention from
‘Barbarossa’.

When he stepped down from the rostrum at the end of his speech
to Reichstag deputies on 4 May, he took his place, as usual, next to
the Deputy Leader of the party, his most slavishly subservient
follower, Rudolf Hef§. Only a few days later, while Hitler was on
the Obersalzberg, the astonishing news came through that his
Deputy had taken a Messerschmitt 110 from Augsburg, flown off on
his own en route for Britain, and disappeared. The news struck the
Berghof like a bombshell. The first wish was that he was dead. ‘It’s
to be hoped he’s crashed into the sea,’ Hitler was heard to say. Then
came the announcement from London -— by then not unexpected —
that Hef$ had landed in Scotland and been taken captive. With the
Russian campaign looming, Hitler was now faced with a domestic
crisis.

On the afternoon of Saturday, 10 May, Hefg had said goodbye to
his wife, Ilse, and young son, Wolf Rtidiger, saying he would be
back by Monday evening. From Munich he had travelled in his
Mercedes to the Messerschmitt works in Augsburg. There, he
changed into a fur-lined flying suit and Luftwaffe captain’s jacket.
(His alias on his mission was to be Hauptmann Alfred Horn.)
Shortly before 6 p.m. on a clear, sunlit evening, his Messerschmitt
110 taxied on to the runway and took off. Shortly after 11 p.m.,
after navigating himself through Germany, across the North Sea,
and over the Scottish Lowlands, Hef wriggled out of the cockpit,
abandoning his plane not far from Glasgow, and parachuted —
something he had never practised — to the ground, injuring his leg
as he left the plane.

Air defence had picked up the flight path, and observers had seen
the plane’s occupant bale out before it exploded in flames. A local
Scottish farmhand, Donald McLean, was, however, first on the
scene. He quickly established that the parachutist, struggling to get

out of his harness, was unarmed. Asked whether he was British or
German, Hefs replied that he was German; his name was
Hauptmann Alfred Horn, and he had an important message to give
to the Duke of Hamilton. When Hamilton was informed in the early
hours that a captured German pilot was demanding to speak to him,
there was no reference to Hefg, and the name of Hauptmann Alfred
Horn meant nothing to the Duke. Puzzled, and very tired, Hamilton
made arrangements to interview the mysterious airman next day,
and went to bed.

The Duke, a wing-commander in the RAF, did eventually arrive
from his base to talk to the German captive by mid-morning on 11
May. ‘Hauptmann Horn’ admitted that his true name was Rudolf
Hef’. The discussion was inconsequential, but convinced Hamilton
that he was indeed face to face with Hefg. By the evening he had
flown south, summoned to report to Churchill at Ditchley Park in
Oxfordshire, frequently used by the British Prime Minister as a
weekend headquarters. By the following day, Monday 12 May, the
professionals from the Foreign Office were involved. It was decided
to send Ivone Kirkpatrick, from 1933 to 1938 First Secretary at the
British Embassy in Berlin and a strong opponent of Appeasement, to
interrogate Hels. Kirkpatrick and Hamilton left to fly to Scotland in
the early evening. It was after midnight by the time they arrived at
Buchanan Castle, near Loch Lomond, to confront the prisoner.

The first Hitler knew of Hefs’s disappearance was in the late
morning of Sunday, 11 May, when Karl-Heinz Pintsch, one of the
Deputy Fuhrer’s adjutants, turned up at the Berghof. He was
carrying an envelope containing a letter which HefS had given him
shortly before taking off, entrusting him to deliver it personally to
Hitler. With some difficulty, Pintsch managed to make plain to
Hitler’s adjutants that it was a matter of the utmost urgency, and
that he had to speak personally to the Ftthrer. When Hitler read
Hefg’s letter, the colour drained from his face. Albert Speer, busying
himself with architectural sketches at the time, suddenly heard an
‘almost animal-like scream’. Then Hitler bellowed, ‘Bormann
immediately! Where is Bormann?!’

In his letter, Hefg had outlined his motives for flying to meet the
Duke of Hamilton, and aspects of a plan for peace between
Germany and Britain to be put before ‘Barbarossa’ was launched. He
claimed he had made three previous attempts to reach Scotland, but
had been forced to abort them because of mechanical problems with
the aircraft. His aim was to bring about, through his own person,
the realization of Hitler’s long-standing idea of friendship with
Britain which the Fithrer himself, despite all efforts, had not
succeeded in achieving. If the Fuhrer were not in agreement, then
he could have him declared insane.

Goring — residing at the time in his castle at Veldenstein near
Nuremberg — was telephoned straight away. Hitler was in no mood
for small-talk. ‘Goring, get here immediately,’ he barked into the
telephone. ‘Something dreadful has happened.’ Ribbentrop was also
summoned. Hitler, meanwhile, had ordered Pintsch, the hapless
bearer of ill tidings, and Hefs’s other adjutant, Alfred Leitgen,
arrested, and spent his time marching up and down the hall ina
rage. The mood in the Berghof was one of high tension and
speculation. Amid the turmoil, Hitler was clear-sighted enough to
act quickly to rule out any possible power-vacuum in the party
leadership arising from Helfs’s defection. Next day, 12 May, he
issued a terse edict stipulating that the former Office of the Deputy
Leader would now be termed the Party Chancellery, and be
subordinated to him personally. It would be led, as before, by Party
Comrade Martin Bormann.

Hitler persuaded himself — taking his lead from what Hefg himself
in his letter had suggested — that the Deputy Fuhrer was indeed
suffering from mental delusion, and insisted on making his
‘madness’ the centre-point of the extremely awkward communiqué
which had to be put out to the German people. There was still no
word of Hel’’s whereabouts when the communiqué was broadcast at
8 p.m. that evening. The communiqué mentioned the letter which
had been left behind, showing ‘in its confusion unfortunately the
traces of a mental derangement’, giving rise to fears that he had
been the ‘victim of hallucinations’. ‘Under these circumstances,’ the

communiqué ended, it had to be presumed that ‘Party Comrade Hels
had somewhere on his journey crashed, that is, met with an
accident.’

Goebbels, overlooked in the first round of Hitler’s consultations,
had by then also been summoned to the Obersalzberg. ‘The Fuhrer
is completely crushed,’ the Propaganda Minister noted in his diary.
‘Whata spectacle for the world: a mentally-deranged second man
after the Fuhrer.’ Meanwhile, early on 13 May, the BBC in London
had brought the official announcement that Hefg indeed found
himself in British captivity.

The first German communiqué composed by Hitler the previous
day would plainly no longer suffice. The new communiqué of 13
May acknowledged Hefs’s flight to Scotland, and capture. It held
open the possibility that he had been entrapped by the British Secret
Service. Affected by delusions, he had undertaken the action of an
idealist without any notion of the consequences. His action, the
communiqué ended, would alter nothing in the struggle against
Britain.

The two communiqués, forced ultimately to concede that the
Deputy Fuhrer had flown to the enemy, and attributing the action to
his mental state, bore all the hallmarks of a hasty and ill-judged
attempt to play down the enormity of the scandal. Remarkably,
Hitler had not turned to Goebbels for propaganda advice on how to
present the débacle, but had relied instead at first on Otto Dietrich,
the press chief. Goebbels was highly critical from the outset about
the ‘mental illness’ explanation. A real difficulty had to be faced:
how to explain that a man recognized for many years as mentally
unbalanced had been left in such an important position in the
running of the Reich. ‘It’s rightly asked how such an idiot could be
the second man after the Ftihrer,’ Goebbels remarked.

Goebbels felt the blow to prestige so deeply that he wanted to
avoid being seen in public. ‘It’s like an awful dream,’ he remarked.
‘The Party will have to chew on it for a long time.’ Hitler himself
was occasionally caught in the line of fire of popular criticism. But,
generally, much sympathy was voiced for the Fuhrer who now had

this, on top of all his other worries, to contend with. As ever, it was
presumed that, while he was working tirelessly on behalf of the
nation, he was kept in the dark, let down, or betrayed by some of
his most trusted chieftains.

This key element of the ‘Fuhrer myth’ was one that Hitler himself
played to when, on 13 May, he addressed a rapidly arranged
meeting of the Reichsleiter and Gauleiter at the Berghof. There was
an air of tension when Goring and Bormann, both grim-faced,
entered the hall before Hitler made his appearance. Bormann read
out Hefs’s final letter to Hitler. The feeling of shock and anger
among those listening was palpable. Then Hitler came into the
room. Much as in the last great crisis within the party leadership, in
December 1932, he played masterfully on the theme of loyalty and
betrayal. Hef$ had betrayed him, he stated. He appealed to the
loyalty of his most trusted ‘old fighters’. He declared that Hef$ had
acted without his knowledge, was mentally ill, and had put the
Reich in an impossible position with regard to its Axis partners. He
had sent Ribbentrop to Rome to placate the Duce. He stressed once
more Hefs’s long-standing odd behaviour (his dealings with
astrologists and the like). He castigated the former Deputy Fihrer’s
opposition to his own orders in continuing to practise flying. A few
days before Hefs’s defection, he went on, the Deputy Ftthrer had
come to see him and asked him pointedly whether he still stood to
the programme of cooperation with England that he had laid out in
Mein Kampf. Hitler said he had, of course, reaffirmed this position.

When he had finished speaking, Hitler leaned against the big
table near the window. According to one account, he was ‘in tears
and looked ten years older’. ‘I have never seen the Fuhrer so deeply
shocked,’ Hans Frank told a gathering of his subordinates in the
General Government a few days later. As he stood near the window,
gradually all the sixty or seventy persons present rose from their
chairs and gathered round him in a semi-circle. No one spoke a
word. Then Goring provided an effusive statement of the devotion
of all present. The intense anger was reserved only for Hels. The
‘core’ following had once more rallied around their Leader, as in the

‘time of struggle’, at a moment of crisis. The regime had suffered a
massive jolt; but the party leadership, its backbone, was still
holding together.

All who saw Hitler in the days after the news of Hels’s defection
broke registered his profound shock, dismay, and anger at what he
saw as betrayal. This has sometimes been interpreted, as it was also
by a number of contemporaries, as clever acting on Hitler’s part,
concealing a plot which only he and Hef$ knew about. Hitler was
indeed capable, as we have noted on more than one occasion, of
putting on a theatrical performance. But if this was acting, it was of
Hollywood-Oscar calibre.

That the Deputy Fuhrer had been captured in Britain was
something that shook the regime to its foundations. As Goebbels
sarcastically pointed out, it never appears to have occurred to Hefs
that this could be the outcome of his ‘mission’. It is hard to imagine
that it would not have crossed Hitler’s mind, had he been engaged
in a plot. But it would have been entirely out of character for Hitler
to have involved himself in such a hare-brained scheme. His own
acute sensitivity towards any potential threat to his own prestige,
towards being made to look foolish in the eyes of his people and the
outside world, would itself have been sufficient to have ruled out
the notion of sending Hef$ on a one-man peace-mission to Britain.
Moreover, there was every reason, from his own point of view, not
to have become involved and to have most categorically prohibited
what Hefs had in mind.

The chances of the Hefg flight succeeding were so remote that
Hitler would not conceivably have entertained the prospect. And
had he done so, it is hard to believe that he would have settled on
Hefg as his emissary. Hefg had not been party to the planning of
‘Barbarossa’. He had been little in Hitler’s presence over the
previous months. His competence was confined strictly to party
matters. He had no experience in foreign affairs. And he had never
been entrusted previously with any delicate diplomatic negotiations.

In any case, Hitler’s motive for contemplating a secret mission
such as Hefs attempted to carry out would be difficult to grasp. For

months Hitler had been single-mindedly preparing to attack and
destroy the Soviet Union precisely in order to force Britain out of
the war. He and his generals were confident that the Soviet Union
would be comprehensively defeated by the autumn. The timetable
for the attack left no room for manoeuvre. The last thing Hitler
wanted was any hold-up through diplomatic complications arising
from the intercession by Hef§ a few weeks before the invasion was
to be launched. Had ‘Barbarossa’ not taken place before the end of
June, it would have had to be postponed to the following year. For
Hitler, this would have been unthinkable. He was well aware that
there were those in the British establishment who would still prefer
to sue for peace. He expected them to do so after, not before,
‘Barbarossa’.

Rudolf Hef$ at no time, whether during his interrogations after
landing in Scotland, in discussions with his fellow-captives while
awaiting trial in Nuremberg, or during his long internment in
Spandau, implicated Hitler. His story never wavered from the one
he gave to Ivone Kirkpatrick at his first interrogation on 13 May
1941. ‘He had come here,’ so Kirkpatrick summed up in his report,
‘without the knowledge of Hitler in order to convince responsible
persons that since England could not win the war, the wisest course
was to make peace now.’

Hefs’s British interlocutors rapidly reached the conclusion that he
had nothing to offer which went beyond Hitler’s public statements,
notably his ‘peace appeal’ before the Reichstag on 19 July 1940.
Kirkpatrick concluded his report: ‘Hef$ does not seem ... to be in the
near counsels of the German government as regards operations; and
he is not likely to possess more secret information than he could
glean in the course of conversations with Hitler and others.’ If, in
the light of this, Hef§ was following out orders from Hitler himself,
he would have had to be as supreme an actor — and to have
continued to be so for the next four decades — as was, reputedly, the
Leader he so revered. But, then, to what end? He said nothing that
Hitler had not publicly on a number of occasions stated himself. He
brought no new negotiating position. It was as if he presumed that

the mere fact of the Deputy Ftthrer voluntarily — through an act
involving personal courage — putting himself in the hands of the
enemy was enough to have made the British government see the
good will of the Fuhrer, the earnest intentions behind his aim of
cooperation with Britain against Bolshevism, and the need to
overthrow the Churchill ‘war-faction’ and settle amicably. The
naivety of such thinking points heavily in the direction of an
attempt inspired by no one but the idealistic, other-worldly, and
muddle-headed Hef.

His own motives were not more mysterious or profound than
they appeared. Hef$ had seen over a number of years, but especially
since the war had begun, his access to Hitler strongly reduced. His
nominal subordinate, Martin Bormann, had in effect been usurping
his position, always in the Fihrer’s company, always able to put ina
word here or there, always able to translate his wishes into action.
A spectacular action to accomplish what the Fuhrer had been
striving for over many years would transform his status overnight,
turning ‘Fraulein Anna’, as he was disparagingly dubbed by some in
the party, into a national hero.

Hefg had remained highly influenced by Karl Haushofer — his
former teacher and the leading exponent of geopolitical theories
which had influenced the formation of Hitler’s ideas of Lebensraum —
and his son Albrecht (who later became closely involved with
resistance groups). Their views had reinforced his belief that
everything must be done to prevent the undermining of the
‘mission’ that Hitler had laid out almost two decades earlier: the
attack on Bolshevism together with, not in opposition to, Great
Britain. Albrecht Haushofer had made several attempts to contact
the Duke of Hamilton, whom he had met in Berlin in 1936, but had
received no replies to his letters. Hamilton himself strenuously
denied, with justification it seems, receiving the letters, and also
denied Helfs’s claim to have met him at the Berlin Olympics in 1936.

By August 1940, when he began to plan his own intervention,
Hels was deeply disappointed in the British response to the ‘peace-
terms’ that Hitler had offered. He was aware, too, that Hitler was

by this time thinking of attacking the Soviet Union even before
Britain was willing to ‘see sense’ and agree to terms. The original
strategy lay thus in tatters. Hefg saw his role as that of the Fuhrer’s
most faithful paladin, now destined to restore through his personal
intervention the opportunity to save Europe from Bolshevism — a
unique chance wantonly cast away by Churchill’s ‘warmongering’
clique which had taken over the British government. Hefg acted
without Hitler’s knowledge, but in deep (if confused) belief that he
was carrying out his wishes.

By the middle of May, after a week preoccupied by the Hef affair,
Hitler could begin to turn his attention back to ‘Barbarossa’. But the
end of what had been a troubled month brought further gloom to
the Berghof with the news on 27 May of the loss of the powerful
battleship Bismarck, sunk in the Atlantic after a fierce clash with
British warships and planes. Some 2,300 sailors went down with the
ship. Hitler did not brood on the human loss. His fury was directed
at the naval leadership for unnecessarily exposing the vessel to
enemy attack — a huge risk, he had thought, for potentially little
gain.

Meanwhile, the ideological preparations for ‘Barbarossa’ were
now rapidly taking concrete shape. Hitler needed to do nothing
more in this regard. He had laid down the guidelines in March. It
was during May that Heydrich assembled the four Einsatzgruppen
(‘task groups’) which would accompany the army into the Soviet
Union. Each of the Einsatzgruppen comprised between 600 and
1,000 men (drawn largely from varying branches of the police
organization, augmented by the Waffen-SS) and was divided into
four or five Einsatzkommandos (‘task forces’) or Sonderkommandos
(‘special forces’). The middle-ranking commanders for the most part
had an educated background. Highly qualified academics, civil
servants, lawyers, a Protestant pastor, and even an opera singer,
were among them. The top leadership was drawn almost exclusively

from the Security Police and SD. Like the leaders of the Reich
Security Head Office, they were in the main well-educated men, of
the generation, just too young to have fought in the First World
War, that had sucked in volkisch ideals in German universities during
the 1920s. During the second half of May, the 3,000 or so men
selected for the Einsatzgruppen gathered in Pretzsch, north-east of
Leipzig, where the Border Police School served as their base for the
ideological training that would last until the launch of ‘Barbarossa’.
Heydrich addressed them on a number of occasions. He avoided
narrow precision in describing their target-groups when they
entered the Soviet Union. But his meaning was, nevertheless, plain.
He mentioned that Jewry was the source of Bolshevism in the East
and had to be eradicated in accordance with the Fuhrer’s aims. And
he told them that Communist functionaries and activists, Jews,
Gypsies, saboteurs, and agents endangered the security of the troops
and were to be executed forthwith. By 22 June the genocidal
whirlwind was ready to blow.

‘Operation Barbarossa rolls on further,’ recorded Goebbels in his
diary on 31 May. ‘Now the first big wave of camouflage goes into
action. The entire state and military apparatus is being mobilized.
Only a few people are informed about the true background.’ Apart
from Goebbels and Ribbentrop, ministers of government
departments were kept in the dark. Goebbels’s own ministry had to
play up the theme of invasion of Britain. Fourteen army divisions
were to be moved westwards to give some semblance of reality to
the charade.

As part of the subterfuge that action was to be expected in the
West while preparations for ‘Barbarossa’ were moving into top gear,
Hitler hurriedly arranged another meeting with Mussolini on the
Brenner Pass for 2 June. It was little wonder that the Duce could
not understand the reason for the hastily devised talks. Hitler’s
closest Axis partner was unwittingly playing his part in an elaborate
game of bluff.

Hitler did not mention a word of ‘Barbarossa’ to his Italian
friends. The published communiqué simply stated that the Ftthrer

and Duce had held friendly discussions lasting several hours on the
political situation. The deception had been successful. When he met
the Japanese Ambassador Oshima the day after his talks with
Mussolini, Hitler dropped a broad hint — which was correctly
understood — that conflict with the Soviet Union in the near future
was unavoidable. But the only foreign statesman to whom he was
prepared to divulge more than hints was the Romanian leader
Marshal Antonescu, when Hitler met him in Munich on 12 June.
Antonescu had to be put broadly in the picture. After all, Hitler was
relying on Romanian troops for support on the southern flank.
Antonescu was more than happy to comply. He volunteered his
forces without Hitler having to ask. When 22 June arrived, he
would proclaim to his people a ‘holy war’ against the Soviet Union.
The bait of recovering Bessarabia and North Bukovina, together
with the acquisition of parts of the Ukraine, was sufficiently
tempting to the Romanian dictator.

On 14 June Hitler held his last major military conference before
the start of ‘Barbarossa’. The generals arrived at staggered times at
the Reich Chancellery to allay suspicion that something major was
afoot. Hitler went over the reasons for attacking Russia. Once
again, he avowed his confidence that the collapse of the Soviet
Union would induce Britain to come to terms. He emphasized that
the war was a war against Bolshevism. The Russians would fight
hard and put up tough resistance. Heavy air-raids had to be
expected. But the Luftwaffe would attain quick successes and
smooth the advance of the land forces. The worst of the fighting
would be over in about six weeks. But every soldier had to know
what he was fighting for: the destruction of Bolshevism. If the war
were to be lost, then Europe would be bolshevized. Most of the
generals had concerns about opening up the two-front war, the
avoidance of which had been a premiss of military planning. But
they did not voice any objections. Brauchitsch and Halder did not
speak a word.

Two days later Hitler summoned Goebbels to the Reich
Chancellery — he was told to enter through a back door in order not

to raise suspicions — to explain the situation. The attack on the
Soviet Union would be the most massive history had ever seen, he
stated. There would be no repeat of Napoleon (a comment perhaps
betraying precisely those subconscious fears of history indeed
repeating itself ). The Russians had around 180-200 divisions, about
as many as the Germans, he said, though there was no comparison
in quality. And the fact that they were massed on the Reich borders
was a great advantage. ‘They would be smoothly rolled up.’ Hitler
thought ‘the action’ would take about four months. Goebbels
estimated even less time would be needed: ‘Bolshevism will collapse
like a house of cards,’ he thought.

On 21 June Hitler dictated the proclamation to the German
people to be read out the next day. He was by this time looking
over-tired, and was in a highly nervous state, pacing up and down,
apprehensive, involving himself in the minutiae of propaganda such
as the fanfares that were to be played over the radio to announce
German victories. Goebbels was called to see him in the evening.
They discussed the proclamation, to which Goebbels added a few
suggestions. They marched up and down his rooms for three hours.
They tried out the new fanfares for an hour. Hitler gradually
relaxed somewhat. ‘The Fuhrer is freed from a nightmare the closer
the decision comes,’ noted Goebbels. ‘It’s always so with him.’ Once
more Goebbels returned to the inner necessity of the coming
conflict, of which Hitler had convinced himself: ‘There is nothing for
it than to attack,’ he wrote, summing up Hitler’s thoughts. ‘This
cancerous growth has to be burned out. Stalin will fall.’ Since July
the previous year, Hitler indicated, he had worked on the
preparations for what was about to take place. Now the moment
had arrived. Everything had been done which could have been
done. ‘The fortune of war must now decide.’ At 2.30 a.m., Hitler
finally decided it was time to snatch a few hours’ sleep. ‘Barbarossa’
was due to begin within the next hour.

Goebbels was too nervous to follow his example. At 5.30 a.m.,
just over two hours after the German guns had opened fire on all
borders, the new fanfares sounded over German radios. Goebbels

read out Hitler’s proclamation. It amounted to a lengthy pseudo-
historical justification for German preventive action. The Jewish-
Bolshevik rulers in Moscow had sought for two decades to destroy
not only Germany, but the whole of Europe. Hitler had been forced,
he claimed, through British encirclement policy to take the bitter
step of entering the 1939 Pact. But since then the Soviet threat had
magnified. At present there were 160 Russian divisions massed on
the German borders. ‘The hour has now therefore arrived,’ Hitler
declared, ‘to counter this conspiracy of the Jewish-Anglo-Saxon
warmongers and the equally Jewish rulers of the Bolshevik
headquarters in Moscow.’ A slightly amended proclamation went
out to the soldiers swarming over the border and marching into
Russia.

On 21 June, Hitler had at last composed a letter to his chief ally,
Benito Mussolini, belatedly explaining and justifying his reasons for
attacking the Soviet Union. Hitler ended his letter with sentences
which, as with his comments to Goebbels, give insight into his
mentality on the eve of the titanic contest: ‘In conclusion, let me say
one more thing, Duce. Since I struggled through to this decision, I
again feel spiritually free. The partnership with the Soviet Union, in
spite of the complete sincerity of the efforts to bring about a final
conciliation, was nevertheless often very irksome to me, for in some
way or other it seemed to me to be a break with my whole origin,
my concepts, and my former obligations. I am happy now to be
relieved of these mental agonies.’

The most destructive and barbaric war in the history of mankind
was beginning. It was the war that Hitler had wanted since the
1920s — the war against Bolshevism. It was the showdown. He had
come to it by a roundabout route. But, finally, Hitler’s war was
there: a reality.

20
Showdown

At dawn on 22 June over 3 million German troops advanced over
the borders and into Soviet territory. By a quirk of history, as
Goebbels noted somewhat uneasily, it was exactly the same date on
which Napoleon’s Grand Army had marched on Russia 129 years
earlier. The modern invaders deployed over 3,600 tanks, 600,000
motorized vehicles (including armoured cars), 7,000 artillery pieces,
and 2,500 aircraft. Not all their transport was mechanized; as in
Napoleon’s day, they also made use of horses — 625,000 of them.
Facing the invading armies, arrayed on the western frontiers of the
USSR, were nearly 3 million Soviet soldiers, backed by a number of
tanks now estimated to have been as many as 14—15,000 (almost
2,000 of them the most modern designs), over 34,000 artillery
pieces, and 8-9,000 fighter-planes. The scale of the titanic clash
now beginning, which would chiefly determine the outcome of the
Second World War and, beyond that, the shape of Europe for nearly
half a century, almost defies the imagination.

Despite the numerical advantage in weaponry of the defending
Soviet armies, the early stages of the attack appeared to endorse all
the optimism of Hitler and his General Staff about the inferiority of
their Bolshevik enemies and the speed with which complete victory
could be attained. The three-pronged attack led by Field-Marshals
Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb in the north, Fedor von Bock in the centre,
and Gerd von Rundstedt in the south initially made astonishing
advances. By the end of the first week of July Lithuania and Latvia
were in German hands. Leeb’s advance in the north, with Leningrad
as the target, had reached as far as Ostrov. Army Group Centre had

pushed even farther. Much of White Russia had been taken. Minsk
was encircled. Bock’s advancing armies already had the city of
Smolensk in their sights. Further south, by mid-July Rundstedt’s
troops had captured Zitomir and Berdicev.

The Soviet calamity was immense — and avoidable. Even as the
German tanks were rolling forwards, Stalin still thought Hitler was
bluffing, that he would not dare attack the Soviet Union until he had
finished with Britain. He had anticipated some German territorial
demands but was confident that, if necessary, negotiations could
stave off an attack in 1941 at least. Stalin’s bungling interference
and military incompetence had combined with the fear and servility
of his generals and the limitations of the inflexible Soviet strategic
concept to rule out undertaking the necessary precautions to create
defensive dispositions and fight a rearguard action. Instead, whole
armies were left in exposed positions, easy prey for the pincer
movements of the rapidly advancing panzer armies. In a whole
series of huge encirclements, the Red Army suffered staggering
losses of men and equipment. By the autumn, some 3 million
soldiers had trudged in long, dismal columns into German captivity.
A high proportion would suffer terrible inhumanity in the hands of
their captors, and not return. Roughly the same number had by then
been wounded or killed. The barbaric character of the conflict,
evident from its first day, had been determined, as we have seen, by
the German plans for a ‘war of annihilation’ that had taken shape
since March. Soviet captives were not treated as soldierly comrades,
Geneva conventions were regarded as non-applicable, political
commissars — a category interpreted in the widest sense — were
peremptorily shot, the civilian population subjected to the cruellest
reprisals. Atrocities were not confined to the actions of the
Wehrmacht. On the Soviet side, Stalin recovered sufficiently from
his trauma at the invasion to proclaim that the conflict was no
ordinary war, but a ‘great patriotic war’ against the invaders. It was
necessary, he declared, to form partisan groups to organize
‘merciless battle’. Mutual fear of capture fed rapidly and directly
into the spiralling barbarization on the eastern front. But it did not

cause the barbarization in the first place. The driving-force was the
Nazi ideological drive to extirpate ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’.

Already on the first day of the invasion reports began reaching
Berlin of up to 1,000 Soviet planes destroyed and Brest-Litowsk
taken by the advancing trooops. ‘We'll soon pull it off,’ wrote
Goebbels in his diary. He immediately added: ‘We must soon pull it
off. Among the people there’s a somewhat depressed mood. The
people want peace ... Every new theatre of war causes concern and
Wworty..

The main author of the most deadly clash of the century, which in
almost four years of its duration would produce an unimaginable
harvest of sorrow for families throughout central and eastern
Europe and a level of destruction never experienced in human
history, left Berlin around midday on 23 June. Hitler was setting
out with his entourage for his new field headquarters in East
Prussia. The presumption was, as it had been in earlier campaigns,
that he would be there a few weeks, make a tour of newly
conquered areas, then return to Berlin. This was only one of his
miscalculations. The ‘Wolf ’s Lair’ (Wolfsschanze) was to be his home
in the main for the next three and a half years. He would finally
leave it a broken man in a broken country.

The Wolf ’s Lair — another play on Hitler’s favourite pseudonym
from the 1920s, when he liked to call himself ‘Wolf’ (allegedly the
meaning of ‘Adolf’, and implying strength) — was hidden away in
the gloomy Masurian woods, about eight kilometres from the small
town of Rastenburg. Hitler and his accompaniment arrived there
late in the evening of 23 June. The new surroundings were not
greatly welcoming. The centre-point consisted of ten bunkers,
erected over the winter, camouflaged and in parts protected against
air-raids by two metres thickness of concrete. Hitler’s bunker was at
the northern end of the complex. All its windows faced north so that
he could avoid the sun streaming in. There were rooms big enough
for military conferences in Hitler’s and Keitel’s bunkers, and a
barracks with a dining-hall for around twenty people. Another
complex — known as HQ Area 2 — a little distance away, surrounded

by barbed wire and hardly visible from the road, housed the
Wehrmacht Operations Staff under Warlimont. The army
headquarters, where Brauchitsch and Halder were based, were
situated a few kilometres to the north-east. Goring — designated by
Hitler on 29 June to be his successor in the event of his death — and
the Luftwaffe staff stayed in their special trains.

Hitler’s part of the Fuhrer Headquarters, known as ‘Security Zone
One’, swiftly developed its own daily rhythm. The central event was
the ‘situation briefing’ at noon in the bunker shared by Keitel and
Jodl. This frequently ran on as long as two hours. Brauchitsch,
Halder, and Colonel Adolf Heusinger, chief of the army’s Operations
Department, attended once or twice a week. The briefing was
followed by a lengthy lunch, beginning in these days for the most
part punctually at 2 p.m., Hitler confining himself as always strictly
to anon-meat diet. Any audiences that he had on non-military
matters were arranged for the afternoons. Around 5 p.m. he would
call in his secretaries for coffee. A special word of praise was
bestowed on the one who could eat most cakes. The second military
briefing, given by Jodl, followed at 6 p.m. The evening meal took
place at 7.30 p.m., often lasting two hours. Afterwards there were
films. The final part of the routine was the gathering of secretaries,
adjutants, and guests for tea, to the accompaniment of Hitler’s late-
night monologues. Those who could snatched a nap some time
during the afternoon so they could keep their eyes open in the early
hours. Sometimes, it was daylight by the time the nocturnal
discussions came to an end.

Hitler always sat in the same place at meals, with his back to the
window, flanked by Press Chief Dietrich and Jodl, with Keitel,
Bormann, and General Karl Heinrich Bodenschatz, Goring’s liaison
officer, opposite him. Generals, staff officers, adjutants, Hitler’s
doctors, and any guests visiting the Fuhrer Headquarters made up
the rest of the complement. The atmosphere was good in these early
days, and not too formal. The mood at this time was still generally
optimistic. Life in the FHQ had not yet reached the stage where it

could be described by Jodl as half-way ‘between a monastery and a
concentration camp’.

Two of Hitler’s secretaries, Christa Schroeder and Gerda
Daranowski, had also accompanied him to his field headquarters.
They had as good as nothing to do. Sleeping, eating, drinking, and
chatting filled up most of their day. Much of their energy was spent
trying to swat away a constant plague of midges. Hitler complained
that his advisers who had picked the spot had chosen ‘the most
swampy, midge-infested, and climatically unfavourable area for
him’, and joked that he would have to send in the Luftwaffe on the
midge-hunt. But ‘the chief ’ was generally in a good mood during
the first part of the Russian campaign.

As in Berlin or at the Berghof, a word during meals on one of
Hitler’s favourite topics could easily trigger an hour-long
monologue. In these early days, he usually faced a big map of the
Soviet Union pinned to the wall. At the drop of a hat, he would
launch into yet another harangue about the danger that Bolshevism
signified for Europe, and how to wait another year would have been
too late. On one occasion, his secretaries heard Hitler, as he stood in
front of a big map of Europe, point to the Russian capital and say:
‘In four weeks we'll be in Moscow. Moscow will be razed to the
ground.’ Everything had gone much better than could have been
imagined, he remarked. They had been lucky that the Russians had
placed their troops on the borders and not pulled the German
armies deep into their country, which would have caused difficulties
with supplies. Two-thirds of the Bolshevik armed forces and five-
sixths of the tanks and aircraft were destroyed or severely damaged,
he told Goebbels, on the Propaganda Minister’s first visit to Fuhrer
Headquarters on 8 July. After assessing the military situation in
detail with his Wehrmacht advisers, Goebbels noted, the Fiihrer’s
conclusion was ‘that the war in the East was in the main already
won’. There could be no notion of peace terms with the Kremlin.
(He would think differently about this only a month later.)
Bolshevism would be wiped out and Russia broken up into its
component parts, deprived of any intellectual, political, or economic

centre. Japan would attack the Soviet Union from the east in a
matter of weeks. He foresaw England’s fall ‘with a sleepwalker’s
certainty’.

News came in of 3,500 aircraft and over 1,000 Soviet tanks
destroyed. But there was other news of fanatical fighting by Soviet
soldiers who feared the worst if they surrendered. Hitler was to tell
the Japanese Ambassador Oshima on 14 July that ‘our enemies are
not human beings any more, they are beasts’. It was, then, doubtless
echoing her ‘chief’ and the general atmosphere in FHQ, when
Christa Schroeder remarked to a friend that ‘from all previous
experience it can be said to be a fight against wild animals’.

Hitler had permitted no Wehrmacht reports during the very first
days of the campaign. But Sunday, 29 June — a week after the attack
had started — was, as Goebbels described it, ‘the day of the special
announcements’. Twelve of them altogether, each introduced by the
‘Russian Fanfare’ based on Liszt’s ‘Les Préludes’, were broadcast,
beginning at 11 a.m. that morning. Dominance in the air had been
attained, the reports proclaimed. Grodno, Brest-Litowsk, Vilna,
Kowno, and Diinaburg were in German hands. Two Soviet armies
were encircled at Bialystok. Minsk had been taken. The Russians
had lost, it was announced, 2,233 tanks and 4,107 aircraft.
Enormous quantities of matériel had been captured. Vast numbers of
prisoners had been taken. But the popular reception in Germany
was less enthusiastic than had been hoped. People rapidly tired of
the special announcements, one after the other, and were sceptical
about the propaganda. Instead of being excited, their senses were
dulled. Goebbels was furious at the OKW’s presentation, and vowed
that it would never be repeated.

The invasion of the Soviet Union was presented to the German
public as a preventive war. This had been undertaken by the Fuhrer,
so Goebbels’s directives to the press ran, to head off at the last
minute the threat to the Reich and the entire western culture
through the treachery of ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’. At any moment the
Bolsheviks had been planning to strike against the Reich and to
overrun and destroy Europe. Only the Ftihrer’s bold action had

prevented this. More extraordinary than this propaganda lie is the
fact that Hitler and Goebbels had convinced themselves of its truth.
Fully aware of its falseness, they had to play out a fiction even
among themselves to justify the unprovoked decision to attack and
utterly destroy the Soviet Union.

By the end of June the German encirclements at Bialystok and
Minsk had produced the astonishing toll of 324,000 Red Army
prisoners, 3,300 tanks, and 1,800 artillery pieces captured or
destroyed. Little over a fortnight later the end of the battle for
Smolensk doubled these figures. Already by the second day of the
campaign, German estimates put numbers of aircraft shot down or
destroyed on the ground at 2,500. When Goring expressed doubts at
the figures they were checked and found to be 2-300 below the
actual total. After a month of fighting, the figure for aircraft
destroyed had reached 7,564. By early July it was estimated that
eighty-nine out of 164 Soviet divisions had been entirely or partially
destroyed, and that only nine out of twenty-nine tank divisions of
the Red Army were still fit for combat.

The scale of underestimation of Soviet fighting potential would
soon come as a severe shock. But in early July it was hardly
surprising if the feeling in the German military leadership was that
‘Barbarossa’ was on course for complete victory, that the campaign
would be over, as predicted, before the winter. On 3 July Halder
summed up his verdict in words which would come to haunt him: ‘It
is thus probably no overstatement to say that the Russian campaign
has been won in the space of two weeks.’ He did at least have the
foresight to acknowledge that this did not mean that it was over:
‘The sheer geographical vastness of the country and the
stubbornness of the resistance, which is carried on with all means,
will claim our efforts for many more weeks to come.’

The territorial gains brought about by the spectacular successes of
the Wehrmacht in the first phase of ‘Barbarossa’ gave Hitler

command over a greater extent of the European continent than any
ruler since Napoleon. His rambling, discursive outpourings, in his
lunchtime or late-night monologues to his regular retinue, were the
purest expression of unbounded, megalomaniac power and
breathtaking inhumanity. They were the face of the future in the
vast new eastern empire, as he saw it.

‘The beauty of the Crimea,’ he rhapsodized late at night on 5 July
1941, would be made accessible to Germans through a motorway. It
would be their version of the Italian or French riviera. Every
German, after the war, he remarked, had to have the chance with
his ‘People’s Car’ (Volkswagen) personally to see the conquered
territories, since he would have ‘to be ready if need be to fight for
them’. The mistake of the pre-war era of limiting the colonial idea
to the property of a few capitalists or companies could not be
repeated. Roads would be more important in the future than the
railways for passenger transport. Only through travel by road could
a country be known, he asserted.

He was asked whether it would be enough to stretch the
conquests to the Urals. ‘Initially’, that would suffice, he replied. But
Bolshevism had to be exterminated, and it would be necessary to
carry out expeditions from there to eradicate anynewcentres that
might develop. ‘St Petersburg’ — as he called Leningrad — ‘was as a
city incomparably more beautiful than Moscow’. But its fate, he
decided, was to be identical to that of the capital. ‘An example was
to be made here, and the city will disappear completely from the
earth.’ It was to be sealed off, bombarded, and starved out. He
imagined, too, that little would ultimately be left of Kiev. He saw
the destruction of Soviet cities as the basis for lasting German
power in the conquered territories. No military power was to be
tolerated within 300 kilometres east of the Urals. ‘The border
between Europe and Asia,’ he stated, ‘is not the Urals but the place
where the settlements of Germanic types of people stop and pure
Slavdom begins. It is our task to push this border as far as possible
to the east, and if necessary beyond the Urals.’

Hitler thought the Russian people fit for nothing but hard work
under coercion. Their natural and desired condition was one of
general disorganization. “The Ukrainians,’ he remarked on another
occasion, ‘were every bit as idle, disorganized, and nihilistically
asiatic as the Greater Russians.’ To speak of any sort of work ethic
was pointless. All they understood was ‘the whip’. He admired
Stalin’s brutality. The Soviet dictator, he thought, was ‘one of the
greatest living human beings since, if only through the harshest
compulsion, he had succeeded in welding a state out of this Slavic
rabbit-family’. He described ‘the sly Caucasian’ as ‘one of the most
extraordinary figures of world history’, who scarcely ever left his
office but could rule from there through a subservient bureaucracy.

Hitler’s model for domination and exploitation remained the
British Empire. His inspiration for the future rule of his master-race
was the Raj. He voiced his admiration on many occasions for the
way such a small country as Great Britain had been able to establish
its rule throughout the world in a huge colonial empire. British rule
in India in particular showed what Germany could do in Russia. It
must be possible to control the eastern territory with quarter of a
million men, he stated. With that number the British ruled 400
million Indians. Russia would always be dominated by German
rulers. They must see to it that the masses were educated to do no
more than read road signs, though a reasonable living standard for
them was in the German interest. The south of the Ukraine, in
particular the Crimea, would be settled by German farmer-soldiers.
He would have no worries at all about deporting the existing
population somewhere or other to make room for them. The vision
was of a latter-day feudal type of settlement: there would be a
standing army of 114-2 million men, providing some 30—40,000
every year for use when their twelve-year service was completed. If
they were sons of farmers, they would be given a farmstead, fully
equipped, by the Reich in return for their twelve years of military
service. They would also be provided with weapons. The only
condition was that they must marry country-not town-girls. German
peasants would live in beautiful settlements, linked by good roads

to the nearest town. Beyond this would be ‘the other world’, where
the Russians lived under German subjugation. Should there be a
revolution, ‘all we need to do is drop a few bombs on their cities
and the business will be over’. After ten years, he foresaw, there
would be a German élite, to be counted on when there were new
tasks to be undertaken. ‘A new type of man will come to the fore,
real master-types, who of course can’t be used in the west:
viceroys.’ German administrators would be housed in splendid
buildings; the governors would live in ‘palaces’.

His musings on the prospect of a German equivalent of India
continued on three successive days and nights from 8-11 August.
India had given the English pride. The vast spaces had obliged them
to rule millions with only a few men. ‘What India was for England,
the eastern territory will be for us,’ he declared.

For Hitler, India was the heart of an Empire that had brought
Britain not only power, but prosperity. Ruthless economic
exploitation had always been central to his dream of the German
empire in the east. Now, it seemed, that dream would soon become
reality. ‘The Ukraine and then the Volga basin will one day be the
granaries of Europe,’ he foresaw. ‘And we'll also provide Europe
with iron. If Sweden won’t supply it one of these days, good, then
we'll take it from the east. Belgian industry can exchange its
products — cheap consumer wares — for corn from these areas. From
Thuringia and the Harz mountains, for example, we can remove our
poor working-class families to give them big stretches of land.’
‘We'll be an exporter of corn for all in Europe who need it,’ he went
on, a month later. ‘In the Crimea we will have citrus fruits, rubber
plants (with 40,000 hectares we’ll make ourselves independent),
and cotton. The Pripet marches will give us reeds. We will deliver
to the Ukrainians head-scarves, glass chains as jewellery, and
whatever else colonial peoples like. We Germans -— that’s the main
thing — must form a closed community like a fortress. The lowest
stable-lad must be superior to any of the natives ...’

Autarky, in Hitler’s thinking, was the basis of security. And the
conquest of the East, as he had repeatedly stated in the mid-1920s,

would now offer Germany that security. ‘The struggle for hegemony
in the world will be decided for Europe through the occupation of
the Russian space,’ he told his entourage in mid-September. ‘This
makes Europe the firmest place in the world against the threat of
blockade.’ He returned to the theme a few days later. ‘As soon as I
recognize a raw material as important for the war, I put every effort
into making us independent in it. Iron, coal, oil, corn, livestock,
wood — we must have them at our disposal ... Today I can say:
Europe is self-sufficient, as long as we just prevent another
mammoth state existing which could utilize European civilization to
mobilize Asia against us.’ He compared, as he had frequently done
many years earlier, the benefits of autarky with the international
market economy and the mistakes, as he saw them, made by Britain
and America through their dependence upon exports and overseas
markets, bringing cut-throat competition, corresponding high tariffs
and production costs, and unemployment. Britain had increased
unemployment and impoverished its working class by the error of
industrializing India, he continued. Germany was not tied to
exports, and this had meant that it was the only country without
unemployment. ‘The country that we are now opening up is for us
only a raw-material source and marketing area, not a field for
industrial production ... We won’t need any more to look for an
active market in the Far East. Here is our market. We simply need
to secure it. We'll deliver cotton goods, cooking-pots, all simple
articles for satisfying the demand for the necessities of life. We
won't be able to produce anything like so much as can be marketed
here. I see there great possibilities for the build-up of a strong
Reich, a true world-power ... For the next few hundred years we
will have a field of activity without equal.’

Hitler was blunt about his justification for conquering this
territory: might was right. A culturally superior people, deprived of
‘living space’, needed no further justification. It was for him, as
always, a matter of the ‘laws of nature’. ‘If I harm the Russians now,
then for the reason that they would otherwise harm me,’ he
declared. ‘The dear God, once again, makes it like that. He suddenly

casts the masses of humanity on to the earth and each one has to
look after himself and how he gets through. One person takes
something away from the other. And at the end you can only say
that the stronger wins. That is after all the most sensible order of
things.’

There would be no end of the struggle in the east, that was clear,
even after a German victory. Hitler spoke of building an ‘Eastern
Wall’ along the Urals as a barrier against sudden inroads from the
‘dangerous human reservoir’ in Asia. It would be no conventional
fortification, but a live wall built of the soldier-farmers who would
form the new eastern settlers. ‘A permanent border struggle in the
east will produce a solid stock and prevent us from sinking back
into the softness of a state system based purely on Europe.’ War was
for Hitler the essence of human activity. ‘What meeting a man
means for a girl,’ he declared, ‘war meant for him.’ He referred
back frequently in these weeks to his own experiences in the First
World War, probably the most formative of his life. Looking at the
newsreel of the ‘Battle of Kiev’, he was completely gripped by ‘a
heroic epic such as there had never previously been’. ‘I’m
immensely happy to have experienced the war in this way,’ he
added. If he could wish the German people one thing, he remarked
on another occasion, it would be to have a war every fifteen to
twenty years. If reproached for the loss of 200,000 lives, he would
reply that he had enlarged the German nation by 2% million, and
felt justified in demanding the sacrifice of the lives of a tenth. ‘Life
is horrible. Coming into being, existing, and passing away, there’s
always a killing. Everything that is born must later die. Whether it’s
through illness, accident, or war, that remains the same.’

Hitler’s notions of a social ‘new order’ have to be placed in this
setting of conquest, ruthless exploitation, the right of the powerful,
racial dominance, and more or less permanent war in a world where
life was cheap and readily expendable. His ideas often had their
roots in the resentment that still smouldered at the way his own
‘talents’ had been left unrecognized or the disadvantages of his own
social status compared with the privileges of the high-born and

well-to-do. Thus he advocated free education, funded by the state,
for all talented youngsters. Workers would have annual holidays
and could expect once or twice in their lives to go on a sea-cruise.
He criticizd the distinctions between different classes of passengers
on such cruise ships. And he approved of the introduction of the
same food for both officers and men in the army. Hitler might
appear to have been promoting ideas of a modern, mobile, classless
society, abolishing privilege and resting solely upon achievement.
But the central tenet remained race, to which all else was
subordinated. Thus, in the east, he said, all Germans would travel in
the upholstered first- or second-class railway carriages — to separate
them from the native population. It was a social vision which could
have obvious attractions for many members of the would-be master-
race. The image was of a cornucopia of wealth flowing into the
Reich from the east. The Reich would be linked to the new frontiers
by motorways cutting through the endless steppes and the
enormous Russian spaces. Prosperity and power would be secured
through the new breed of supermen who lorded it over the
downtrodden Slav masses.

The vision, to those who heard Hitler describe it, appeared
excitingly modern: a break with traditional class- and status-bound
hierarchies to a society where talent had its reward and there was
prosperity for all — for all Germans, that is. Indeed, elements of
Hitler’s thinking were unquestionably modern. He looked, for
instance, to the benefits of modern technology, envisaging steam-
heated greenhouses giving German cities a regular supply of fresh
fruit and vegetables all through the winter. He looked, too, to
modern transport to open up the east. While the bounty of the east
pouring into Germany would be brought by train, the car for Hitler
was the vital transport means of the future. But for all its apparent
modernity, the social vision was in essence atavistic. The colonial
conquests of the nineteenth century provided its inspiration. What
Hitler was offering was a modernized version of old-fashioned
imperialist conquest, now translated to the ethnically mixed terrain
of eastern Europe where the Slavs would provide the German

equivalent of the conquered native populations of India and Africa
in the British Empire.

By mid-July, the key steps had been taken to translate the
horrendous vision into reality. At an important five-hour meeting in
the Fiihrer Headquarters on 16 July attended by Goring, Rosenberg,
Lammers, Keitel, and Bormann, Hitler established the basic
guidelines of policy and practical arrangements for administering
and exploiting the new conquests. Once more, the underlying
premiss was the social-Darwinist justification that the strong
deserved to inherit the earth. But the sense that what they were
doing was morally objectionable nevertheless ran through Hitler’s
opening comments, as reported by Bormann. “The motivation of our
steps in the eyes of the world must be directed by tactical
viewpoints. We must proceed here exactly as in the cases of
Norway, Denmark, Holland, and Belgium. In these cases, too, we
had said nothing about our intentions and we will sensibly continue
not to do this,’ Bormann recorded. ‘We will then again emphasize
that we were compelled to occupy an area to bring order, and to
impose security. In the interest of the native population we had to
see to providing calm, food, transport etc. etc. Therefore our
settlement. It should then not be recognizable that a final settlement
is beginning! All necessary measures — shooting, deportation etc. —
we will and can do anyway. We don’t want to make premature and
unnecessary enemies. We will simply act, therefore, as if we wish to
carry out a mandate. But it must be clear to us that we will never
again leave these territories,’ Hitler’s blunt statement continued.
‘Accordingly, it is a matter of: 1. doing nothing to hinder the final
settlement but rather preparing this in secret; 2. emphasizing that
we are the liberators ... Basically, it’s a matter of dividing up the
giant cake so that we can first rule it, secondly administer it, and
thirdly exploit it. The Russians have now given out the order for a
partisan war behind our front. This partisan war again has its
advantage: it gives us the possibility of exterminating anything
opposing us. As a basic principle: the construction of a military

power west of the Urals must never again be possible, even if as a
consequence we have to wage war for a hundred years.’

Hitler proceeded to make appointments to the key positions in
the occupied east. Rosenberg was confirmed next day as head of
what appeared on the surface to be the all-powerful Reich Ministry
for the Occupied Eastern Territories. But nothing was as it seemed
in the Third Reich. Rosenberg’s authority, as Hitler’s decree made
clear, did not touch the respective spheres of competence of the
army, Goring’s Four-Year Plan organization, and the SS. The big
guns, in other words, were outside Rosenberg’s control. More than
that, Rosenberg’s own conception of winning certain nationalities as
allies, under German tutelage, against Greater Russia — notions
which he and his staff had been working on since the spring -— fell
foul of Himmler’s policy of maximum repression and brutal
resettlement and Goring’s aims of total economic exploitation.
Himmler was within weeks in receipt of plans for deporting in the
coming twenty-five years or so over 30 million people into far more
inhospitable climes further eastward. Goring was envisaging the
starvation in Russia of 20-30 million persons — a prospect advanced
even before the German invasion by the Agricultural Group of the
Economic Staff for the East. All three - Rosenberg, Himmler, and
Goring — could find a common denominator in Hitler’s goal of
destroying Bolshevism and acquiring ‘living space’. But beyond that
minimum, Rosenberg’s concept — no less ruthless, but more
pragmatic — had no chance when opposed to the contrary idea,
backed by Hitler’s own vision, of absolute rapaciousness and
repression.

Opposing Rosenberg’s wishes, Hitler had yielded in the
conference of 16 July to the suggestion of Goring, backed by
Bormann, that the — even by Nazi standards — extraordinarily brutal
and independent-minded Erich Koch, Gauleiter of East Prussia,
should be made Reich Commissar of the key territory of the
Ukraine. Koch, like Hitler, but in contrast to Rosenberg, rejected
any idea of a Ukrainian buffer-state. His view was that from the
very beginning it was necessary ‘to be hard and brutal’. He was held

in favour at Fuhrer Headquarters. Everyone there thought he was
the most suitable person to carry out the requirements in the
Ukraine. It was seen as a compliment when they called him the
‘second Stalin’.

In contrast to the tyrant, Koch, who continued to prefer his old
East Prussian domain to his new fiefdom, Hinrich Lohse, appointed
as Reich Commissar in the Baltic, now renamed the Ostland, made
himself a subject of ridicule among the German occupying forces in
his own territory with his fanatical and often petty
bureaucratization, unleashed in torrents of decrees and directives.
For all that, he was weak in the face of the power of the SS, and
other competing agencies. Similarly, Wilhelm Kube, appointed at
the suggestion of Goring and Rosenberg as Reich Commissar in
Belorussia, proved not only corrupt and incompetent on a grandiose
scale, but another weak petty dictator in his province, his
instructions often ignored by his own subordinates, and forced
repeatedly to yield to the superior power of the SS.

The course was set, therefore, for a ‘New Order’ in the east which
belied the very name. Nothing resembled order. Everything
resembled the war of all against all, built into the Nazi system in
the Reich itself, massively extended in occupied Poland, and now
taken to its logical denouement in the conquered lands of the Soviet
Union.

Ill

In fact, despite the extraordinary gains made by the advancing
Wehrmacht, July would bring recognition that the operational plan
of ‘Barbarossa’ had failed. And for all the air of confidence that
Hitler displayed to his entourage in the Wolf ’s Lair, these weeks
also produced early indications of the tensions and conflicts in
military leadership and decision-making that would continue to
bedevil the German war effort. Hitler intervened in tactical matters
from the outset. As early as 24 June he had told Brauchitsch of his
worries that the encirclement at Bialystok was not tight enough.

The following day he was expressing concern that Army Groups
Centre and South were operating too far in depth. Halder dismissed
the worry. ‘The old refrain!’ he wrote in his diary. ‘But that is not
going to change anything in our plans.’ On 27, 29, and 30 June and
again on 2 and 3 July Halder recorded worried queries or
interventions by Hitler in tactical deployments of troops. ‘What is
lacking on top level,’ he confided to his diary notes, ‘is that
confidence in the executive commands which is one of the most
essential features of our command organization.’

Halder’s irritation at Hitler’s interference was understandable.
But the errors and misjudgements, even in the first, seemingly so
successful, phase of ‘Barbarossa’, were as much those of the
professionals in Army High Command as of the former First World
War corporal who now thought he was the greatest warlord of all
time.

The mounting conflict with Hitler revolved around the
implementation of the ‘Barbarossa’ strategic plan that had been laid
down the previous December. This in turn had emanated from the
feasibility studies carried out during the summer by military
strategists. Army High Command had favoured making Moscow the
key objective. Hitler’s own, different, conception was not dissimilar
in a number of essentials from the independent strategic study
prepared for the Wehrmacht Operational Staff in September 1940,
though it differed from this, too, on the crucial question of Moscow.

The emphasis in Hitler’s ‘Barbarossa Directive’ in December, and
in all subsequent strategic planning, had been on the thrusts to the
north, to take Leningrad and secure the Baltic, and to the south, to
seize the Ukraine. Even if unenthusiastically, the Army General Staff
had accepted the significant alteration of what it had originally
envisaged. According to this amended plan, Army Group Centre was
to advance as far as Smolensk before swinging to the north to meet
up with Leeb’s armies for the assault on Leningrad. The taking of
Moscow figured in the agreed plan of ‘Barbarossa’ only once the
occupation of Leningrad and Kronstadt had been completed.

Already on 29 June Hitler was worried that Bock’s Army Group
Centre, where the advance was especially spectacular, would
overreach itself. On 4 July he claimed that he faced the most
difficult decision of the campaign: whether to hold to the original
‘Barbarossa’ plan, amend it to provide for a deep thrust towards the
Caucasus (in which Rundstedt would be assisted by some of Army
Group Centre’s panzer forces), or retain the panzer concentration in
the centre and push forward to Moscow. The decision he reached by
8 July was the one wanted by Halder: to press forward the offensive
of Army Group Centre with the aim of destroying the mass of the
enemy forces west of Moscow. The amended strategy now
discarded Army Group Centre’s turn towards Leningrad, built into
the original ‘Barbarossa’ plan. The ‘ideal solution’, Hitler accepted,
would be to leave Leeb’s Army Group North to attain its objectives
by its own means. However, Hitler was even now by no means
reconciled to the priority of capturing Moscow - in his eyes, as he
said, ‘merely a geographical idea’.

The conflict with Army High Command, supported by Army
Group Centre, about concentration on the taking of Moscow as the
objective, continued over the next weeks. Hitler pressed, in revised
operational form, for priority to be given to the capture of
Leningrad, and now included in the south the drive to the industrial
area of Kharkhov and into the Caucasus, to be reached before the
onset of winter. At the same time, his ‘Supplement to Directive No.
33’, dated 23 July, indicated that Army Group Centre would destroy
the enemy between Smolensk and Moscow by its infantry divisions
alone, and would then ‘take Moscow into occupation’.

By late July Halder had changed his tune about the certainty and
speed of victory. Early in the month he had told Hitler that only
forty-six of the known 164 Soviet divisions were still capable of
combat. This had been in all probability an over-estimation of the
extent of destruction; it was certainly a rash under-estimation of the
enemy’s ability to replenish its forces. On 23 July he revised the
figure to a total of ninety-three divisions. The enemy had been
‘decisively weakened’, but by no means ‘finally smashed’, he

concluded. As a consequence, since the Soviet reserves of manpower
were now seen to be inexhaustible, Halder argued even more
forcefully that the aim of further operations had to be the
destruction of the areas of armaments production around Moscow.

As the strength of Soviet defences was being revised, the toll on
the German army and Luftwaffe also had to be taken into account.
Air-crews were showing signs of exhaustion; their planes could not
be maintained fast enough. By the end of July only 1,045 aircraft
were serviceable. Air-raids on Moscow demanded by Hitler were of
little effect because so few planes were available. Most of the
seventy-five raids on the Soviet capital carried out over the next
months were undertaken by small numbers of bombers, scarcely
able to make a pinprick in Soviet armaments production. The
infantry were even more in need of rest. They had been marching,
and engaged in fierce fighting, for over a month without a break.
The original operational plan had foreseen a break for recuperation
after twenty days. But the troops had received no rest by the
fortieth day, and the first phase of the campaign was not over. By
this time, casualties (wounded, missing, and dead) had reached
213,301 officers and men. Moreover, despite miracles worked by
Quartermaster-General Eduard Wagner’s organization, transport
problems on roads often unfit even in midsummer for mechanized
transport brought immeasurable problems of maintaining supply-
lines of fuel, equipment, and provisions to the rapidly advancing
army. Supplies for Army Group Centre required twenty-five goods
trains a day. But despite working round the clock to convert the
railway lines to a German gauge, only eight to fifteen trains a day
were reaching the front line in late July and early August.

It was becoming obvious already by the end of July that the
revised ‘Barbarossa’ operational plan as laid down in Hitler’s
Supplement to Directive No. 33 could not be carried out before
winter descended. Hitler interpreted this as demanding panzer
support from Army Group Centre for the assault on Leningrad.
Moscow could wait. Halder took the diametrically opposite view.
Making Moscow the objective would ensure that the Soviets

committed the bulk of their forces to its defence. Taking the city,
including its communications system and industries, would split the
Soviet Union and render resistance more difficult. The implication
was that the capture of the capital would bring about the fall of the
Soviet system, and the end of the eastern war. If the attack on
Moscow were not pushed through with all speed, the enemy would
bring the offensive to a halt before winter, then regroup. The
military aim of the war against the Soviet Union would have failed.

Hitler was still adamant that capturing the industrial region of
Kharkhov and the Donets Basin and cutting off Soviet oil supplies
would undermine resistance more than the fall of Moscow. But he
was wavering. At this point, even Jodl and the Wehrmacht
Operations Staff had been converted to the need to attack Moscow.
Citing the arrival of strong enemy reinforcements facing and
flanking Army Group Centre, Hitler now, on 30 July, cancelled the
Supplement to Directive No. 33. Halder was momentarily ecstatic.
‘This decision frees every thinking soldier of the horrible vision
obsessing us these last few days, since the Fihrer’s obstinacy made
the final bogging down of the eastern campaign appear imminent.’
But when Directive No. 34 was issued the same day it offered
Halder little comfort. Army Group Centre was to recuperate for the
next attack; in the north the assault on Leningrad was to continue;
and Army Group South was to destroy the enemy forces west of the
Dnieper and in the vicinity of Kiev. The real decision — for or
against the drive to Moscow — had effectively just been postponed
for a while.

In early August Hitler remained wedded to Leningrad as the
priority. He reckoned this would be cut off by 20 August, and then
troops and aircraft could be redeployed by Army Group Centre. The
second priority for Hitler was, as before, ‘the south of Russia,
especially the Donets region’, which formed the ‘entire basis of the
Russian economy’. Moscow was a clear third on his priority-list. He
recognized that in this order of priorities the capital could not be
taken before winter. Halder tried unavailingly to get Brauchitsch to
obtain a clear decision on whether to put everything into delivering

the enemy a fatal blow at Moscow or taking the Ukraine and the
Caucasus for economic reasons. He persuaded Jodl to intervene
with Hitler to convince him that the objectives of Moscow and the
Ukraine had to be met.

By now, Halder was realizing the magnitude of the task facing
the Wehrmacht. ‘The whole situation makes it increasingly plain
that we have underestimated the Russian colossus,’ he wrote on 11
August. ‘At the outset of the war, we reckoned with about 200
enemy divisions. Now we have already counted 360. These divisions
indeed are not armed and equipped according to our standards, and
their tactical leadership is often poor. But there they are, and if we
smash a dozen of them, the Russians simply put up another dozen ...
And so our troops, sprawled over an immense front line, without
any depth, are subjected to the incessant attacks of the enemy.’

In his Supplement to Directive No. 34, issued on 12 August, Hitler
for the first time stated categorically that once the threats from the
flanks were eliminated and the panzer groups were refreshed the
attack on the enemy forces massed for the protection of Moscow
was to be prosecuted. The aim was ‘the removal from the enemy
before winter of the entire state, armaments, and communications
centre around Moscow’, ran the directive. Three days later,
however, Hitler intervened once more in the tactical dispositions by
ordering panzer forces from the northern flank of Army Group
Centre to help Army Group North resist a strong Soviet counter-
attack.

His concession, if heavily qualified, on Moscow, then — in effect —
rapid negation of the decision, may have been affected by the
severe attack of dysentery from which he was suffering in the first
half of August. Despite mounting hypochondria, he had, in fact,
over the past years enjoyed remarkably good health — perhaps
surprisingly so, given his eating habits and lifestyle. But he had now
been laid low at a vital time. Goebbels found him still unwell and
‘very irritable’, though on the mend, when he visited FHQ on 18
August. The weeks of tension and the unexpected military
difficulties of the past month had taken their toll, the Propaganda

Minister thought. In fact, electrocardiograms taken at the time
indicated that Hitler had rapidly progressive coronary sclerosis.
Morell’s discussion of the results of the tests could have done little
to lift Hitler’s mood, or to lessen his hypochondria.

Probably Hitler’s ill-health in August, at a time when he was
stunned by the recognition of the gross underestimation by German
intelligence of the true level of Soviet forces, temporarily weakened
his resolve to continue the war in the east. Goebbels was plainly
astonished, on his visit to FHQ on 18 August, to hear Hitler
entertain thoughts of accepting peace-terms from Stalin and even
stating that Bolshevism, without the Red Army, would be no danger
to Germany. (Stalin, in fact, appears briefly to have contemplated
moves to come to terms, involving large-scale surrender of Soviet
territory, in July.) In a pessimistic state of mind about an early and
comprehensive victory in the east, Hitler was clutching at straws:
perhaps Stalin would sue for peace; maybe Churchill would be
brought down; quite suddenly peace might break out. The turnabout
could come as quickly as it had done in January 1933, he suggested
(and would do so on other occasions down to 1945), when, without
prospects at the start of the month, the National Socialists had
within a matter of weeks found themselves in power.

Halder’s own nerves were by this point also frayed. He now
thought the time had come to confront Hitler once and for all with
the imperative need to destroy the enemy forces around Moscow.
On 18 August Brauchitsch sent Halder’s memorandum on to Hitler.
It argued that Army Groups North and South would have to attain
their objectives from within their own resources, but that the main
effort must be the immediate offensive against Moscow, since Army
Group Centre would be unable to continue its operations after
October on account of weather conditions.

Halder’s memorandum had been prepared by Colonel Heusinger,
the army’s Chief of Operations Department. Two days after its
submission, Heusinger discussed the memorandum with Jod1.
Hitler’s closest military adviser suggested psychological motives
behind the Dictator’s strategic choices. Heusinger recalled Jodl

saying that Hitler had ‘an instinctive aversion to treading the same
path as Napoleon. Moscow gives him a sinister feeling.” When
Heusinger reaffirmed the need to defeat the enemy forces at
Moscow, JodlI replied: ‘That’s what you say. Now I will tell you
what the Fihrer’s answer will be: There is at the moment a much
better possibility of beating the Russian forces. Their main grouping
is now east of Kiev.’ Heusinger pressed Jodl to support the
memorandum. Jodl finally remarked: ‘I will do what I can. But you
must admit that the Fithrer’s reasons are well thought out and
cannot be pushed aside just like that. We must not try to compel
him to do something which goes against his inner convictions. His
intuition has generally been right. You can’t deny that!’ The Fuhrer
myth still prevailed - and among those closest to Hitler.

Predictably, Hitler’s reply was not long in coming — and was a
devastating riposte to Army High Command. On 21 August, Army
High Command was told that Hitler rejected its proposals as out of
line with his intentions. Instead, he ordered: ‘The principal object
that must still be achieved before the onset of winter is not the
capture of Moscow, but rather, in the South, the occupation of the
Crimea and the industrial and coal region of the Donets, together
with isolation of the Russian oil regions in the Caucasus and, in the
North, the encirclement of Leningrad and junction with the Finns.’
The immediate key step was the encirclement and destruction of the
exposed Soviet Fifth Army in the region of Kiev through a pincer
movement from Army Groups Centre and South. This would open
the path for Army Group South to advance south-eastwards towards
Rostov and Kharkhov. The capture of the Crimea, Hitler added, was
‘of paramount importance for safeguarding our oil supply from
Romania’. All means had to be deployed, therefore, to cross the
Dnieper quickly to reach the Crimea before the enemy could call up
new forces.

Hitler developed his arguments the following day in a ‘Study’
blaming Army High Command for failing to carry out his
operational plan, reaffirming the necessity of shifting the main
weight of the attack to the north and south, and relegating Moscow

to a secondary target. Brauchitsch was accused of lack of leadership
in allowing himself to be swayed by the special interests of the
individual army groups. And particularly wounding was the praise,
in contrast, handed out to Goring’s firm leadership of the Luftwaffe.

In this ‘Study’ of 22 August, Hitler rehearsed once more the
objective of eliminating the Soviet Union as a continental ally of
Britain, thereby removing from Britain hope of changing the course
of events in Europe. This objective, he claimed, could only be
attained through annihilation of Soviet forces and the occupation or
destruction of the economic basis for continuing the war, with
special emphasis on sources of raw materials. He reasserted the
need to concentrate on destroying the Soviet position in the Baltic
and on occupying the Ukraine and Black Sea region, which were
vital in terms of raw materials for the Soviet war economy. He also
underlined the need to protect German oil supplies in Romania.
Army High Command was to blame for ignoring his orders to press
home the advance on Leningrad. He insisted that the three divisions
from Army Group Centre, intended from the beginning of the
campaign to assist the numerically weaker Army Group North,
should be rapidly supplied, and that the objective of capturing
Leningrad would then be met. Once this was done, the motorized
units supplied by Army Group Centre could be used to concentrate
on their sole remaining objective, the advance on Moscow. In the
south, too, there was to be no diversion from original plans. Once
the destruction of the Soviet forces east and west of Kiev which
threatened the flank of Army Group Centre was accomplished, he
argued, the advance on Moscow would be significantly eased. He
rejected, therefore, the Army High Command’s proposals for the
further conduct of operations.

In the privacy of his diary notes, Halder could not contain
himself. ‘I regard the situation created by the Fihrer’s interference
unendurable for the OKH,’ he wrote. ‘No other but the Fiihrer
himself is to blame for the zigzag course caused by his successive
orders.’ The treatment of Brauchitsch, Halder went on, was
‘absolutely outrageous’. Halder had proposed to the Commander-in-

Chief that both should offer their resignation. But Brauchitsch had
refused such a step ‘on the grounds that the resignations would not
be accepted and so nothing would be changed’.

Deeply upset, Halder flew next day to Army Group Centre
headquarters. The assembled commanders predictably backed his
preference for resuming the offensive on Moscow. They were
agreed that to move on Kiev would mean a winter campaign. Field-
Marshal von Bock suggested that General Heinz Guderian, one of
Hitler’s favourite commanders, and particularly outspoken at the
meeting, should accompany Halder to Fiihrer Headquarters in an
attempt to persuade the dictator to change his mind and agree to
Army High Command’s plan.

It was getting dark as Halder and Guderian arrived in East
Prussia. According to Guderian’s later account — naturally aimed at
reflecting himself in the best light - Brauchitsch forbade him to
raise the question of Moscow. The southern operation had been
ordered, the Army Commander-in-Chief declared, so the problem
was merely one of how to carry it out. Discussion was pointless.
Neither Brauchitsch nor Halder accompanied Guderian when he
went in to see Hitler, who was flanked by a large entourage
including Keitel, Jodl, and Schmundt. Hitler himself raised the issue
of Moscow, according to Guderian, and then, without interruption,
let him unfold the arguments for making the advance on the Russian
capital the priority. When Guderian had finished, Hitler started.
Keeping his temper, he put the alternative case. The raw materials
and agricultural base of the Ukraine were vital for the continuation
of the war, he stated. The Crimea had to be neutralized to rule out
attacks on the Romanian oil-fields. ‘My generals know nothing
about the economic aspects of war,’ Guderian heard him say for the
first time. Hitler was adamant. He had already given strict orders
for an attack on Kiev as the immediate strategic objective. Action
had to be carried out with that in mind. All those present nodded at
every sentence that Hitler spoke. The OKW representatives were
entirely behind him. Guderian felt isolated. He avoided all further
argument. He took the view, so he remarked much later, that since

the decision to attack the Ukraine was confirmed, it was now his
task to ensure that it was carried out as effectively as possible to
ensure victory before the autumn rains.

When he reported to Halder next day, 24 August, the Chief of the
Army General Staff fell into a rage at Guderian’s complete volte-face
on being confronted by Hitler at first hand. Halder’s dismay was all
the greater since Guderian, whom he had considered as a possible
future Army Commander-in-Chief, had been among the most
vehement critics of Hitler during the meeting at Army Group Centre
Headquarters the previous day. Bock shared Halder’s contempt for
the way the outspoken and forthright Guderian had caved in under
Hitler’s pressure. In reality, whatever the opprobrium now heaped
on him by his superiors, there had been little prospect of Guderian
changing Hitler’s mind. At any rate, the die was cast. The great
battle for Kiev and mastery of the Ukraine was about to begin.

By the time the ‘Battle of Kiev’ was over on 25 September — the
city of Kiev itself had fallen six days earlier — the Soviet south-west
front was totally destroyed. Hitler’s insistence on sending
Guderian’s Panzer Group south to bring about the encirclement had
led to an extraordinary victory. An astonishing number of Soviet
prisoners — around 665,000 — were taken. The enormous booty
captured included 884 tanks and 3,018 artillery pieces. The victory
paved the way for Rundstedt to go on to occupy the Ukraine, much
of the Crimea, and the Donets Basin, with further huge losses of
men and material for the Red Army. In the light of the immense
scale of the Soviet losses in the three months since the beginning of
‘Barbarossa’, the German military leadership now concluded that the
thrust to Moscow - given the name ‘Operation Typhoon’ — could
still succeed despite starting so late in the year.

It was scarcely any wonder, basking in the glow of the great
victory at Kiev, that Hitler was in ebullient mood when Goebbels
spoke alone with him in the Ftthrer Headquarters on 23 September.
Hitler’s reported comments afford a notable insight into his thinking
at this juncture. After bitterly complaining about the difficulties in
getting his way with the ‘experts’ in the General Staff, Hitler

expressed the view that the defeats imposed on the Red Army in the
Ukraine marked the breakthrough. ‘The spell is broken,’ Goebbels
recorded. Things would now unfold quickly on other parts of the
front. New great victories could be expected in the next three to
four weeks. By mid-October, the Bolsheviks would be in full retreat.
The next thrust was towards Kharkov, which would be reached
within days, then to Stalingrad and the Don. Once this industrial
area was in German hands, and the Bolsheviks were cut off from
their coal supplies and the basis of their armaments production, the
war was lost for them.

Leningrad, birthplace of Bolshevism, Hitler repeated, would be
destroyed street by street and razed to the ground. Its 5 million
population could not be fed. The plough would one day once more
pass over the site of the city. Bolshevism began in hunger, blood,
and tears. It would end the same way. Asia’s entry-gate to Europe
would be closed, the Asiatics forced back to where they belonged. A
similar fate to Leningrad, he reiterated, might also befall Moscow.
The attack on the capital would follow the capture of the industrial
basin. The operation to surround the city should be completed by 15
October. And once German troops reached the Caucasus Stalin was
lost. Hitler was sure that in such a situation, Japan would not miss
the opportunity to make gains in the east of the Soviet Union. What
then happened would be up to Stalin. He might capitulate. Or he
might seek a ‘special peace’, which Hitler would naturally take up.
With its military power broken, Bolshevism would represent no
further danger.

He returned to a familiar theme. With the defeat of Bolshevism,
England would have lost its last hope on the Continent. Its final
chance of victory would disappear. And the increasing successes by
U-boats in the Atlantic which would follow in the next weeks would
put further pressure on a Churchill who was betraying signs of
nervous strain. Hitler did not rule out Britain removing Churchill in
order to seek peace. Hitler’s terms would be as they always were:
he was prepared to leave the Empire alone, but Britain would have
to get out of Europe. The British would probably grant Germany a

free hand in the east, but try to retain hegemony in western Europe.
That, he would not allow. ‘England had always felt itself to be an
insular power. It is alien to Europe, or even hostile to Europe. It has
no future in Europe.’

All in all, the prospects at this point, in Hitler’s eyes, were rosy.
One remark indicated, however, that an early end to the conflict
was not in sight. Hitler told Goebbels in passing — his assumption
would soon prove disastrously misplaced — that all necessary
precautions had been made for wintering the troops in the east.

By this time, in fact, Hitler and the Wehrmacht leaders had
already arrived at the conclusion that the war in the east would not
be over in 1941. The collapse of the Soviet Union, declared an OKW
memorandum of 27 August, approved by Hitler, was the next and
decisive war aim. But, the memorandum ran, ‘if it proves impossible
to realize this objective completely during 1941, the continuation of
the eastern campaign has top priority for 1942’. The military
successes over the summer had been remarkable. But the aim of the
quick knock-out blow at the heart of the ‘Barbarossa’ plan had not
been realized. In spite of their vast losses, the Soviet forces had
been far from comprehensively destroyed. They continued to be
replenished from an apparently limitless reservoir of men and
resources, and to fight tooth and nail. German losses were
themselves not negligible. Already before the ‘Battle of Kiev’,
casualties numbered almost 400,000, or over 11 per cent of the
eastern army. Replacements were becoming more difficult to find.
By the end of September, half of the tanks were out of action or in
different stages of repair. And by now the autumn rains were
already beginning to turn the roads into impassable quagmires.
Whatever the successes of the summer, objective grounds for
continued optimism had to be strongly qualified. The drive to
Moscow that began on 2 October, seeking the decisive victory
before the onset of winter, rested on hope more than expectation. It
was a desperate last attempt to force the conclusive defeat of the
Soviet Union before winter. It amounted to an improvisation

marking the failure of the original ‘Barbarossa’ plan rather than its
crowning glory.

Hitler’s own responsibility for the difficulties now faced by the
German army is evident. Whereas Stalin learnt from the calamities
of 1941 and came to leave military matters increasingly to the
experts, Hitler’s interference in tactical detail as well as grand
strategy, arising from his chronic and intensifying distrust of the
Army High Command, was, as Halder’s difficulties indicated,
intensely damaging. The tenacity and stubbornness with which he
refused to concede the priority of an attack on Moscow, even when
for a while, at the end of July, not just the army leadership but his
own closest military adviser, Jodl, had accepted the argument, was
quite remarkable. After the glorious victories of 1940, Hitler
believed his own military judgement was superior to that of any of
his generals. His contempt for Brauchitsch and Halder was
reinforced on every occasion that their views on tactics differed
from his. Conversely, the weeks of conflict, and the bewildering
way in July and August in which directives were arrived at, then
amended, undermined the confidence in Hitler not just of the
hopelessly supine Brauchitsch and of Halder’s Army General Staff,
but also of the field commanders.

But the problem was not one-sided. The tension between the
conflicting conceptions of the eastern campaign had still been
unresolved as far as Halder was concerned when Hitler’s Directive
No. 21 on 18 December 1940 had indicated Moscow as a secondary
rather than primary objective, prefiguring the dispute of the coming
summer months. If reluctantly, Army High Command had
apparently accepted the alternative strategy which Hitler favoured.
Strategic planning of the attack in subsequent months followed from
this premiss.

The strategy of first gaining control over the Baltic and cutting
off essential Soviet economic heartlands in the south, while at the
same time protecting German oil supplies in Romania, before
attacking Moscow was not in itself senseless. And the fear that a
frontal assault on Moscow would simply drive back instead of

enveloping Soviet forces was a real one. Army High Command’s
preference to deviate from the plan of ‘Barbarossa’ once the
campaign was under way was not a self-evident improvement. The
reversion to Halder’s originally preferred strategy was tempting
because Army Group Centre had advanced faster and more
spectacularly than anticipated, and was pressing hard to be allowed
to continue and, as it thought, finish the job by taking Moscow. But
even more it now followed from the realization that the army’s
intelligence on Soviet military strength had been woeful. The attack
on Moscow, though favoured in the OKH’s thinking from an early
stage, had in fact come to be a substitute for the ‘Barbarossa’ plan,
which had gone massively awry not simply because of Hitler’s
interference, but also because of the inadequacy and failures of the
army leadership.

Since Hitler had placed the key men, Brauchitsch and Halder, in
their posts, he must take a good deal of the blame for their failings.
But as Commander-in-Chief of the Army, Brauchitsch was
irredeemably weak and ineffectual. His contribution to strategic
planning appears to have been minimal. Torn between pressures
from his field commanders and bullying from Hitler, he offered a
black hole where clear-sighted and determined military leadership
was essential. Long before the crisis which would ultimately bring
his removal from office, Brauchitsch was a broken reed. The
contempt with which Hitler treated him was not without
justification.

Halder, partly through his own post-war apologetics and his
flirtations (though they came to nothing) with groups opposed to
Hitler, has been more generously viewed by posterity. As Chief of
the General Staff, responsibility for the planning of army operations
was his. The chequered relations with the High Command of the
Wehrmacht, in large measure Hitler’s own mouthpiece, of course
gravely weakened Halder’s position. But the Chief of the General
Staff failed to highlight difficulties in the original ‘Barbarossa’ plan.
The northward swing of Army Group Centre forces was not fully
worked out. The problems that motorized forces would face in the

terrain between Leningrad and Moscow were not taken into
account. Halder was lukewarm from the outset about the
concentration on the Baltic and would have preferred the frontal
assault on Moscow. But instead of being settled beforehand, the
dispute was left to fester once the campaign was under way.

Moreover, the all-out attack on Moscow that Halder — and
Commander of Army Group Centre von Bock — were urging, would
itself have been a highly risky venture. It would then almost
certainly have been impossible to eliminate the large Soviet forces
on the flanks (as happened in the ‘Battle of Kiev’). And the Russians
were expecting the attack on the capital. Had the Wehrmacht
reached the city, in the absence of a Luftwaffe capable of razing
Moscow to the ground (as Hitler wanted), the result would
probably have been a preview of what was eventually to happen at
Stalingrad.

That the eastern campaign was blown off course already by late
summer of 1941 cannot solely, or even mainly, be put down to
Hitler’s meddling in matters which should have been left to the
military professionals. The implication, encountered in some post-
war memoirs, that, left to their own devices, the military would
have won the war in the east for Germany was both a self-defensive
and an arrogant claim. The escalating problems of ‘Barbarossa’ were
ultimately a consequence of the calamitous miscalculation that the
Soviet Union would collapse like a pack of cards in the wake of a
Blitzkrieg resting on some highly optimistic assumptions, gross
underestimation of the enemy, and extremely limited resources.
This was Hitler’s miscalculation. But it was shared by his military
planners.

In his lengthy talk with Hitler on 23 September, Goebbels took the
opportunity to describe the state of morale within Germany. Hitler,
remarked the Propaganda Minister, was well aware of the ‘serious

psychological test’ to which the German people had been subjected

over the past weeks. Goebbels pressed Hitler, who had not appeared
in public since the start of the Russian campaign and had last spoken
to the German people on 4 May, following the victorious Balkan
campaign, to come to Berlin to address the nation. Hitler agreed
that the time was ripe, and asked Goebbels to prepare a mass
meeting to open the Winter Aid campaign at the end of the
following week. The date of the speech was fixed for 3 October.

Around 1 p.m. that day, Hitler’s train pulled into Berlin. Goebbels
was immediately summoned to the Reich Chancellery. He found
Hitler looking well and full of optimism. In the privacy of Hitler’s
room, he was given an overview of the situation at the front. The
advance on Moscow, which had begun the previous day, was
proceeding beyond expectations. Big successes were being attained.
‘The Fuhrer is convinced,’ commented Goebbels, ‘that if the weather
stays moderately favourable the Soviet army will be essentially
smashed within a fortnight.’

Cheering crowds, which the party never had any trouble in
mobilizing, lined the streets as Hitler was driven in the afternoon to
the Sportpalast. A rapturous reception awaited him in the cavernous
hall. Goebbels compared it with the mass meetings in the run-up to
power. Hitler justified the attack on the Soviet Union as preventive.
He said German precautions had been incomplete on only one thing:
‘We had no idea how gigantic the preparations of this enemy were
against Germany and Europe, and how immense the danger was,
how by a hair’s breadth we have escaped the annihilation not only
of Germany, but of the whole of Europe.’ He claimed, at last
coming out with the words that his audience were anxious to hear:
‘I can say today that this enemy is already broken and will not rise
up again.’

Almost every sentence towards the end was interrupted by storms
of applause. Hitler, despite the lengthy break, had not lost his
touch. The audience in the Sportpalast rose as one in an ecstatic
ovation at the end. Hitler was thrilled with his reception. But he
was in a hurry to get away. He was driven straight back to the

station. By 7 p.m., a mere six hours after he had arrived, he was on
his way back to his headquarters in East Prussia.

Goebbels had been with Hitler on the way to the station as the
latest news came in from the front. The advance was going even
better than expected. Halder purred, soon after its start, that
Operation Typhoon was ‘making pleasing progress’ and pursuing ‘an
absolutely classical course’. The German army had thrown seventy-
eight divisions, comprising almost 2 million men, and nearly 2,000
tanks, supported by a large proportion of the Luftwaffe, against
Marshal Timoshenko’s forces. Once more, the Wehrmacht seemed
invincible. Once more, vast numbers of prisoners — 673,000 of them
— fell into German hands, along with immeasurable amounts of
booty, this time in the great encirclements of the double battle of
Brjansk and Viaz’ma in the first half of October. It was hardly any
wonder that the mood in the Fuhrer Headquarters and among the
military leadership was buoyant. On the evening of 8 October,
Hitler spoke of the decisive turn in the military situation over the
previous three days. Werner Koeppen, Rosenberg’s liaison at Fuhrer
Headquarters, reported to his boss that ‘the Russian army can
essentially be seen as annihilated’.

Hitler had been in an unusually good mood at the meal table on
the evening of 4 October, having just returned from a visit to Army
High Command’s headquarters to congratulate Brauchitsch on his
sixtieth birthday. Not for the first time, he gazed into the future in
the ‘German East’. Within the next half-century, he foresaw 5
million farms settled there by former soldiers who would hold down
the Continent through military force. He placed no value in
colonies, he said, and could quickly come to terms with England on
that score. Germany needed only a little colonial territory for coffee
and tea plantations. Everything else it could produce on the
Continent. Cameroon and a part of French Equatorial Africa or the
Belgian Congo would suffice for Germany’s needs. ‘Our Mississippi
must be the Volga, not the Niger,’ he concluded.

Next evening, after Himmler had regaled those round the dinner
table with his impressions of Kiev, and how 80-90 per cent of the

impoverished population there could be ‘dispensed with’, Hitler
came round to the subject of German dialects. It started with his
dislike of the Saxon accent and spread to a rejection of all German
dialects. They made the learning of German for foreigners more
difficult. And German now had to be made into the general form of
communication in Europe.

Hitler was still in expansive frame of mind when Reich
Economics Minister Walther Funk visited him on 13 October. The
eastern territories would mean the end of unemployment in Europe,
he claimed. He envisaged river links from the Don and the Dnieper
between the Black Sea and the Danube, bringing oil and grain to
Germany. ‘Europe — and not America — will be the land of unlimited
possibilities.’

Four days later, the presence of Fritz Todt prompted Hitler to an
even more grandiose vision of new roads stretching through the
conquered territories. Motorways would now run not just to the
Crimea, but to the Caucasus, as well as more northerly areas.
German cities would be established as administrative centres on the
river-crossings. Three million prisoners-of-war would be available to
supply the labour for the next twenty years. German farmsteads
would line the roads. ‘The monotonous Asiatic-like steppe would
soon offer a totally different appearance.’ He now spoke of 10
million Germans, as well as settlers from Scandinavia, Holland,
Flanders, and even America putting down roots there. The Slav
population would ‘have to vegetate further in their own dirt away
from the big roads’. Knowing how to read the road-signs would be
quite sufficient education. Those eating German bread today, he
said, did not get worked up about the regaining of the East Elbian
granaries with the sword in the twelfth century. ‘Here in the east a
similar process will repeat itself for a second time as in the conquest
of America.’ Hitler wished he were ten to fifteen years younger to
experience what was going to happen.

But by this time weather conditions alone meant the chances of
Hitler’s vision ever materializing were sharply diminishing. The
weather was already bad. By mid-October, military operations had

stalled as heavy rains swept over the front. Units were stranded.
The vehicles of Army Group Centre were bogged down on
impassable roads. Away from the choked roads, nothing could
move. ‘The Russians are impeding us far less than the wet and the
mud,’ commented Field-Marshal Bock. Everywhere, it was a
‘struggle with the mud’. On top of that, there were serious
shortages of fuel and munitions.

There was also, not before time, concern now about winter
provisions for the troops. Hitler directly asked Quartermaster-
General Wagner, on a visit to Fuhrer Headquarters, about this on 26
October. Wagner promised that Army Groups North and South
would have a half of their necessary provisions by the end of the
month, though Army Group Centre, the largest of the three, would
only have a third. Supplying the south was especially difficult since
the Soviets had destroyed part of the railway track along the Sea of
Azov. Even so, when Wagner spoke to Goebbels, he gave the
Propaganda Minister the impression that ‘everything had been
thought of and nothing forgotten’.

In fact, Wagner appears to have become seriously concerned by
this vital matter only with the rapid deterioration of the weather in
mid-October, while Halder had been aware as early as August that
the problem of transport of winter clothing and equipment to the
eastern front could only be solved by the defeat of the Red Army
before the worst of the weather set in. Brauchitsch was still
claiming, when he had lengthy talks with Goebbels on 1 November,
that an advance to Stalingrad was possible before the snows arrived
and that by the time the troops took up their winter quarters
Moscow would be cut off. By now this was wild optimism.
Brauchitsch was forced to acknowledge the existing weather
problems, the impassable roads, transport difficulties, and the
concern about the winter provisioning of the troops. In truth,
whatever the unrealism of the Army and Wehrmacht High
Commands about what was attainable in their view before the
depths of winter, the last two weeks of October had had a highly
sobering effect on the front-line commanders and the initial

exaggerated hopes of the success of ‘Operation Typhoon’. By the
end of the month the offensive of Army Group Centre’s exhausted
troops had ground temporarily to a halt.

The impression which Hitler gave, however, in his traditional
speech to the party’s old guard, assembled in the Lowenbraukeller
in Munich on the late afternoon of 8 November, the anniversary of
the 1923 Putsch, was quite different. The speech was intended
primarily for domestic consumption. It aimed to boost morale, and
to rally round the oldest and most loyal members of Hitler’s retinue
after the difficult months of summer and autumn. Hitler described
the scale of the Soviet losses. ‘My Party Comrades,’ he declared, ‘no
army in the world, including the Russian, recovers from those.’
‘Never before,’ he went on, ‘has a giant empire been smashed and
struck down in a shorter time than Soviet Russia.’ He remarked on
enemy claims that the war would last into 1942. ‘It can last as long
as it wants,’ he retorted. ‘The last battalion in this field will be a
German one.’ Despite the triumphalism, it was the strongest hint yet
that the war was far from over.

Next day, Hitler was again on his way back to East Prussia,
arriving in the Wolf ’s Lair that evening. In the east, by this time,
the snow was falling. Torrential rain had given way to ice and
temperatures well below zero Fahrenheit. Even tanks were often
unable to cope with ice-covered slopes. For the men, conditions
were worsening by the day. There was already an acute shortage of
warm clothing to protect them. Severe cases of frostbite were
becoming widespread. The combat-strength of the infantry had sunk
drastically. Army Group Centre alone had lost by this time
approaching 300,000 men, with replacements of little more than
half that number available.

It was at this point, on 13 November, that, at a top-level
conference of Army Group Centre, in a temperature of -8 degrees
Fahrenheit, Guderian’s panzer army, as part of the orders for the
renewed offensive, was assigned the objective of cutting off
Moscow from its eastward communications by taking Gorki, 250
miles to the east of the Soviet capital. The astonishing lack of

realism in the army’s orders derived from the perverse obstinacy
with which the General Staff continued to persist in the view that
the Red Army was on the point of collapse, and was greatly inferior
to the Wehrmacht in fighting-power and leadership. Such views,
despite all the evidence to the contrary, still prevailing with Halder
(and, indeed, largely shared by the Commander-in-Chief of Army
Group Centre, Bock), underlay the memorandum, presented by the
General Staff on 7 November, for the second offensive. The
hopelessly optimistic goals laid down — the occupation of Maykop (a
main source of oil from the Caucasus), Stalingrad, and Gorki were
on the wish-list — were the work of Halder and his staff. There was
no pressure by Hitler on Halder. In fact, quite the reverse: Halder
pressed for acceptance of his operational goals. These corresponded
in good measure with goals Hitler had foreseen as attainable only in
the following year. Had Hitler been more assertive at this stage in
rejecting Halder’s proposals, the disasters of the coming weeks
might have been avoided. As it was, Hitler’s uncertainty, hesitancy,
and lack of clarity allowed Army High Command the scope for
catastrophic errors of judgement.

The opposition which Halder’s plans encountered at the
conference on 13 November then resulted in a restriction of the
goals to a direct assault on Moscow. This was pushed through in full
recognition of the insoluble logistical problems and immense
dangers of an advance in near-arctic conditions without any
possibility of securing supplies. Even the goal was not clear. The
breach of Soviet communications to the east could not possibly be
attained. Forward positions in the vicinity of Moscow were utterly
exposed. Only the capture of the city itself, bringing — it was
presumed — the collapse and capitulation of the Soviet regime and
the end of the war, could justify the risk. But with insufficient air-
power to bomb the city into submission before the ground-troops
arrived, entry into Moscow would have meant street-by-street
fighting. With the forces available, and in the prevailing conditions,
it is difficult to see how the German army could have proved
victorious.

Nevertheless, in mid-November the drive on Moscow
recommenced. Hitler was by now distinctly uneasy about the new
offensive. On the evening of 25 November he expressed, according
to the recollection of his Army Adjutant, Major Gerhard Engel, his
‘great concern about the Russian winter and weather’. ‘We started a
month too late,’ he went on, ending, characteristically, by
remarking that time was ‘his greatest nightmare’.

A few days earlier, Hitler had been more outwardly optimistic in
a three-hour conversation with Goebbels. ‘If the weather stays
favourable, he still wants to make the attempt to encircle Moscow
and thereby abandon it to hunger and devastation,’ the Propaganda
Minister noted. Hitler played down the difficulties; they occurred in
every war. ‘World history was not made by weather,’ he added.

On 29 November, with Hitler once again briefly in Berlin,
Goebbels had a further chance to speak with him at length. Hitler
appeared full of optimism and confidence, brimming with energy, in
excellent health. He professed still to be positive, despite the
reversal in Rostov, where General Ewald von Kleist’s panzer army
had been forced back the previous day after initially taking the city.
Hitler now intended to withdraw sufficiently far from the city to
allow massive air-raids which would bomb it to oblivion as a
‘bloody example’. The Fuhrer had never favoured, wrote Goebbels,
taking any of the Soviet major cities. There were no practical
advantages in it, and it simply left the problem of feeding the
women and children. There was no doubt, Hitler went on, that the
enemy had lost most of their great armaments centres. That, he
claimed, had been the aim of the war, and had been largely
achieved. He hoped to advance further on Moscow. But he
acknowledged that a great encirclement was impossible at present.
The weather uncertainty meant any attempt to advance a further
200 kilometres to the east, without secure supplies, would be
madness. The front-line troops would be cut off and would have to
be withdrawn with a great loss of prestige which, at the current
time, could not be afforded. So the offensive had to take place on a
smaller scale. Hitler still expected Moscow to fall. When it did,

there would be little left of it but ruins. In the following year, there
would be an expansion of the offensive to the Caucasus to gain
possession of Soviet oil supplies — or at least deny them to the
Bolsheviks. The Crimea would be turned into a huge German
settlement area for the best ethnic types, to be incorporated into the
Reich territory as a Gau — named the ‘Ostrogoth Gaw’ as a reminder
of the oldest Germanic traditions and the very origins of
Germandom. ‘What cannot be achieved now, will be achieved in the
coming summer,’ were Hitler’s sentiments, according to Goebbels’s
notes.

Hitler’s show of optimism was put on to delude Goebbels — or
himself. On the very same day that he spoke with the Propaganda
Minister, he was told by Walter Rohland — in charge of tank
production and just back from a visit to the front — in the presence
of Keitel, Jodl, Brauchitsch, and other military leaders, of the
superiority of the Soviet panzer production. Rohland also warned, in
the light of his own experience gleaned from a trip to the USA in
1930, of the immense armaments potential which would be ranged
against Germany should America enter the war. The war would then
be lost for Germany. Fritz Todt, one of Hitler’s most trusted and
gifted ministers, who had arranged the meeting about armaments,
followed up Rohland’s comments with a statement on German
armaments production. Whether in the meeting, or more privately
afterwards, Todt added: ‘This war can no longer be won militarily.’
Hitler listened without interruption, then asked: ‘How, then, should
I end this war?’ Todt replied that the war could only be concluded
politically. Hitler retorted: ‘I can scarcely still see a way of coming
politically to an end.’

As Hitler was returning to East Prussia on the evening of 29
November, the news coming in from the front was not good. Over
the next days things were to worsen markedly.

Immediately on his return to the Wolf ’s Lair, Hitler fell into ‘a
state of extreme agitation’ about the position of Kleist’s panzer
army, thrown back from Rostov. Kleist wanted to move back to a
secure defensive position at the mouth of the Bakhmut River. Hitler

forbade this and demanded the retreat be halted further east.
Brauchitsch was summoned to Fuhrer Headquarters and subjected to
a torrent of abuse. Browbeaten, the Commander-in-Chief, an ill and
severely depressed man, passed on the order to the Commander of
Army Group South, Field-Marshal von Rundstedt. The reply came
from Rundstedt, evidently not realizing that the order had come
from Hitler himself, that he could not obey it, and that either the
order must be changed or he be relieved of his post. This reply was
passed directly to Hitler. In the early hours of the following
morning, Rundstedt, one of Hitler’s most outstanding and loyal
generals, was sacked — the scapegoat for the setback at Rostov — and
the command given to Field-Marshal Walter von Reichenau. Later
that day, Reichenau telephoned to say the enemy had broken
through the line ordered by Hitler and requested permission to
retreat to the line Rundstedt had demanded. Hitler concurred.

On 2 December, Hitler flew south to view Kleist’s position for
himself. He was put fully in the picture about the reports, which he
had not seen, from the Army Group prior to the attack on Rostov.
The outcome had been accurately forecast. He exonerated the Army
Group and the panzer army from blame. But he did not reinstate
Rundstedt. That would have amounted to a public acceptance of his
own error.

By that same date, 2 December, German troops, despite the
atrocious weather, had advanced almost to Moscow. Reconnaissance
troops reached a point only some twelve miles from the city centre.
But the offensive had become hopeless. In intense cold — the
temperature outside Moscow on 4 December had dropped to — 32
degrees Fahrenheit — and without adequate support, Guderian
decided on the evening of 5 December to pull back his troops to
more secure defensive positions. Hoepner’s 4th Panzer Army and
Reinhardt’s 3rd, some twenty miles north of the Kremlin, were
forced to do the same. On 5 December, the same day that the
German offensive irredeemably broke down, the Soviet counter-
attack began. By the following day, 100 divisions along a 200-mile

stretch of the front fell upon the exhausted soldiers of Army Group
Centre.

Amid the deepening gloom in the Fuhrer Headquarters over events
in the east, the best news Hitler could have wished for arrived.
Reports came in during the evening of Sunday, 7 December that the
Japanese had attacked the American fleet anchored at Pearl Harbor
in Hawaii. Early accounts indicated that two battleships and an
aircraft carrier had been sunk, and four others and four cruisers
severely damaged. The following morning President Roosevelt
received the backing of the US Congress to declare war on Japan.
Winston Churchill, overjoyed now to have the Americans ‘in the
same boat’ (as Roosevelt had put it to him), had no difficulty in
obtaining authorization from the War Cabinet for an immediate
British declaration of war.

Hitler thought he had good reason to be delighted. ‘We can’t lose
the war at all,’ he exclaimed. ‘We now have an ally which has never
been conquered in 3,000 years.’ This rash assumption was
predicated on the view which Hitler had long held: that Japan’s
intervention would both tie the United States down in the Pacific
theatre, and seriously weaken Britain through an assault on its
possessions in the Far East.

Relations between Japan and the USA had been sharply
deteriorating throughout the autumn. Though kept in the dark
about details, the German Ambassador in Tokyo, General Eugen
Ott, informed Berlin early in November of his impressions that war
between Japan and the USA and Britain was likely. He had also
learned that the Japanese administration was about to ask for an
assurance that Germany would go to Japan’s aid in the event of her
becoming engaged in war with the USA.

The Japanese leadership had, in fact, taken the decision on 12
November that, should war with the USA become inevitable, an
attempt would be made to reach agreement with Germany on

participation in the war against America, and on a commitment to
avoid a separate peace. On 21 November Ribbentrop had laid down
the Reich’s policy to Ott: Berlin regarded it as self-evident that if
either country, Germany or Japan, found itself at war with the USA,
the other country would not sign a separate peace. Two days later,
General Okamoto, the head of the section of the Japanese General
Staff dealing with foreign armies, went a stage further. He asked
Ambassador Ott whether Germany would regard itself as at war
with the USA if Japan were to open hostilities. There is no record of
Ribbentrop’s replying to Ott’s telegram, which arrived on 24
November. But when he met Ambassador Oshima in Berlin on the
evening of 28 November, Ribbentrop assured him that Germany
would come to Japan’s aid if she were to be at war with the USA.
And there was no possibility of a separate peace between Germany
and the USA under any circumstances. The Fithrer was determined
on this point. Already two days before Ribbentrop met Oshima,
Japanese air and naval forces had set out for Hawaii. And on 1
December, the order had been given to attack on the 7th.

Ribbentrop’s assurances were fully in line with Hitler’s remarks
during Matsuoka’s visit to Berlin in the spring, that Germany would
immediately draw the consequences should Japan get into conflict
with the USA. But at this point, before entering any formal
agreement with the Japanese, Ribbentrop evidently deemed it
necessary to consult Hitler. He told Oshima this on the evening of 1
December. The next day, Hitler flew, as we saw, to visit Army
Group South following the setback at Rostov. Bad weather forced
him to stay overnight in Poltava on the way back, where he was
apparently cut off from communications. He was able to return to
his headquarters only on 4 December. Ribbentrop reached him there
and gained approval for what amounted to a new tripartite pact —
which the German Foreign Minister rapidly agreed with Ciano —
stipulating that should war break out between any one of the
partners and the USA, the other two states would immediately
regard themselves as also at war with America. Already before
Pearl Harbor, therefore, Germany had effectively committed itself

to war with the USA should Japan — as now seemed inevitable —
become involved in hostilities.

The agreement was still unsigned when the Japanese attacked
Pearl Harbor. This unprovoked Japanese aggression gave Hitler
what he wanted without having already committed himself formally
to any action from the German side. However, he was keen to have
a revised agreement — completed on 11 December, and now
stipulating only an obligation not to conclude an armistice or peace
treaty with the USA without mutual consent — for propaganda
reasons: to include in his big speech to the Reichstag that afternoon.

As soon as he had heard the news of the Japanese attack, Hitler
had telephoned Goebbels, expressing his delight, and ordering the
summoning of the Reichstag for Wednesday, 10 December, ‘to make
the German stance clear’. Goebbels commented: ‘We will, on the
basis of the Tripartite Pact, probably not avoid a declaration of war
on the United States. But that’s now not so bad. We’re now to a
certain extent protected on the flanks. The United States will no
longer be so rashly able to provide England with aircraft, weapons,
and transport-space, since it can be presumed that they will need all
that for their own war with Japan.’

From a propaganda point of view, the Japanese attack at Pearl
Harbor was most timely for Hitler. Given the crisis on the eastern
front, he had little favourable to include in a progress report to the
German people. But now the Japanese attack gave him a positive
angle. On 8 December, Ribbentrop told Ambassador Oshima that
the Flhrer was contemplating the best way, from the psychological
point of view, of declaring war on the United States. Since he
wanted time to prepare carefully such an important speech, Hitler
had the assembling of the Reichstag postponed by a day, to 11
December. At least, Goebbels remarked, the time of the speech,
three o’clock in the afternoon, though scarcely good for the German
public, would allow the Japanese and Americans to hear it.

That Germany would declare war on the USA was a matter of
course. No agreement with the Japanese compelled it. But Hitler did
not hesitate. A formal declaration might have to wait until the

Reichstag could be summoned. But at the earliest opportunity, on
the night of 8-9 December, he had already given the order to U-
boats to sink American ships. A formal declaration of war was
necessary to ensure as far as possible — in accordance with the
agreement of 11 December — that Japan would remain in the war.
And it was also important, from Hitler’s point of view, to retain the
initiative, and not let this pass to the United States. Certain, as he
had been for many months, that Roosevelt was just looking for the
chance to intervene in the European conflict, Hitler thought that his
declaration was merely anticipating the inevitable and, in any case,
formalizing what was in effect already the situation. Not least, for
the German public, it was important to demonstrate that he still
controlled events. To await a certain declaration of war from
America would, from Hitler’s standpoint, have been a sign of
weakness. Prestige and propaganda, as always, were never far from
the centre of Hitler’s considerations. ‘A great power doesn’t let itself
have war declared on it, it declares war itself,’ Ribbentrop —
doubtless echoing Hitler’s sentiments — told Weizsacker.

Hitler’s speech on the afternoon of Thursday, 11 December, was
not one of his best. The first half consisted of no more than the
lengthy, triumphalist report on the progress of the war which Hitler
had intended to provide long before the events of Pearl Harbor. The
rest of the speech was largely taken up with a long-drawn-out,
sustained attack on Roosevelt. Hitler built up the image of a
President, backed by the ‘entire satanic insidiousness’ of the Jews,
set on war and the destruction of Germany. Eventually he came to
the climax of his speech: the provocations — up to now unanswered
— had finally forced Germany and Italy to act. He read out a version
of the statement he had had given to the American Chargé d’Affaires
that afternoon, with a formal declaration of war on the USA. He
then announced the new agreement, signed that very day,
committing Germany, Italy, and Japan to rejecting a unilateral
armistice or peace with Britain or the USA.

In Goebbels’s view, Hitler’s speech had had a ‘fantastic’ effect on
the German people, to whom the declaration of war had come

neither as a surprise, nor a shock. In reality, the speech had been
able to do little to raise morale, which, given the certain extension
of the war into the indefinite future, and now the opening of
aggression against a further powerful adversary, had sunk to its
lowest point since the conflict began.

Hitler agreed with Goebbels’s wishes to prepare the people for
unavoidable setbacks through propaganda more attuned to the
realism of the harshness of war and the sacrifices it demanded.
Hitler and Goebbels evidently discussed the catastrophic lack of
winter clothing for the troops, and the effect this was having on
morale. Goebbels was well aware from the bitter criticism in
countless soldiers’ letters to their loved ones of how bad the impact
of the supplies crisis was on morale, both at the front and at home.
But Hitler’s eyes were already set on the big spring offensive in
1942. And, as always when faced with setbacks, he pointed to the
‘struggle for power’, and how difficulties had at that time been
overcome.

The need to boost morale, in the first instance among those he
held responsible for upholding it on the home front, undoubtedly
lay behind Hitler’s address to his Gauleiter on the afternoon of 12
December.

He began with the consequences of Pearl Harbor. If Japan had
not entered the war, he would have at some point had to declare
war on the USA. ‘Now the East-Asia conflict falls to us like a present
in the lap,’ Goebbels reported him saying. The psychological
significance should not be underrated. Without the conflict between
Japan and the USA, a declaration of war on the Americans would
have been difficult to accept by the German people. As it was, it
was taken as a matter of course. The extension to the conflict also
had positive consequences for the U-boat war in the Atlantic. Freed
of restraint, he expected the tonnage sunk now to increase greatly —
and this would probably be decisive in winning the war.

He turned to the war in the east. Both tone and content were
much as they had been with Goebbels in private. He acknowledged
that the troops had had for the time being to be pulled back to a

defensible line, but, given the supplies problems, saw this as far
better than standing some 300 kilometres further east. The troops
were now being saved for the coming spring and summer offensive.
A new panzer army in preparation within Germany would be ready
by then.

It was his firm intention, he declared, in the following year to
finish off Soviet Russia at least as far as the Urals. ‘Then it would
perhaps be possible to reach a point of stabilization in Europe
through a sort of half-peace’, by which he appeared to mean that
Europe would exist as a self-sufficient, heavily armed fortress,
leaving the remaining belligerent powers to fight it out in other
theatres of war.

He outlined his vision of the future. It was essential after the war
was over to undertake a huge social programme embracing workers
and farmers. The German people had deserved this. And it would
provide — always the political reasoning behind the aim of material
improvement — the ‘most secure basis of our state system’. The
enormous housing programme he had in mind would, he stated
openly, be made possible through cheap labour — through
depressing wages. The work would be done by the forced labour of
the defeated peoples. He pointed out that the prisoners-of-war were
now being fully employed in the war economy. This was as it
should be, he stated, and had been the case in antiquity, giving rise
in the first place to slave labour. German war-debts would doubtless
be 200-300 billion Marks. These had to be covered through the
work ‘in the main of the people who had lost the war’. The cheap
labour would allow houses to be built and sold at a substantial
profit which would go towards paying off the war-debts within ten
to fifteen years.

Hitler put forward once more his vision of the East as Germany’s
‘future India’, which would become within three or four generations
‘absolutely German’. There would, he made clear, be no place in
this utopia for the Christian Churches. For the time being, he
ordered slow progression in the ‘Church Question’. ‘But it is clear,’
noted Goebbels, himself among the most aggressive anti-Church

radicals, ‘that after the war it has to be generally solved ... There is,
namely, an insoluble opposition between the Christian and a
Germanic-heroic world-view.’

Pressing engagements in Berlin prevented Hitler from returning
that evening, as he had intended, to the Wolf’s Lair. When he
eventually reached his headquarters again, in the morning of 16
December, it was back to a reality starkly different from the rosy
picture he had painted to his Gauleiter. A potentially catastrophic
military crisis was unfolding.

Already before Hitler had left for Berlin, Field-Marshal von Bock
had outlined the weakness of his Army Group against a
concentrated attack, and stated the danger of serious defeat if no
reserves were sent. Then, while Hitler was in the Reich capital, as
the Soviet counter-offensive penetrated German lines, driving a
dangerous wedge between the 2nd and 4th Armies, Guderian
reported the desperate position of his troops and a serious ‘crisis in
confidence’ of the field commands. After Schmundt had been sent to
Army Group Centre on 14 December to discuss the situation at first
hand, Hitler responded immediately, neither awaiting the report
from Brauchitsch, who had accompanied Schmundt, nor involving
Halder. Colonel-General Friedrich Fromm, Commander of the
Reserve Army, was summoned and asked for a report on the
divisions that could be sent straight away to the eastern front.
Goring and the head of the Wehrmacht transport, Lieutenant-
General Rudolf Gercke, were told to arrange the transport. Four and
a half divisions of reserves, assembled throughout Germany at
breakneck speed, were rushed to the haemorrhaging front. Another
nine divisions were drummed up from the western front and the
Balkans. On 15 December Jodl passed on to Halder Hitler’s order
that there must be no retreat where the front could possibly be
held. But where the position was untenable, and once preparations
for an orderly withdrawal had been made, retreat to a more

defensible line was permitted. This matched the recommendations
of Bock and of the man who would soon replace him as Commander
of Army Group Centre, at this time still commanding the 4th Army,
Field-Marshal Gunther von Kluge. That evening, Brauchitsch, deeply
depressed, told Halder that he saw no way out for the army from its
current position. Hitler had by this time long since ceased listening
to his broken Army Commander-in-Chief and was dealing directly
with his Army Group Commanders.

Bock had, in fact, already recommended to Brauchitsch on 13
December that Hitler should make a decision on whether the Army
Group Centre should stand fast and fight its ground, or retreat. In
either eventuality, Bock had openly stated, there was the danger
that the Army Group would collapse ‘in ruins’. Bock advanced no
firm recommendation. But he indicated the disadvantages of retreat:
the discipline of the troops might give way, and the order to stand-
fast at the new line be disobeyed. The implication was plain. The
retreat might turn into a rout. Bock’s evaluation of the situation,
remarkably, had not been passed on to Hitler at the time. He only
received it on 16 December, when Bock told Schmundt what he had
reported to Brauchitsch three days earlier.

That night, Guderian, who two days earlier had struggled through
a blizzard for twenty-two hours to meet Brauchitsch at Roslavl and
put his case for a withdrawal, was telephoned on a crackly line by
Hitler: there was to be no withdrawal; the line was to be held;
replacements would be sent. Army Group North was told the same
day, 16 December, that it had to defend the front to the last man.
Army Group South had also to hold the front and would be sent
reserves from the Crimea after the imminent fall of Sevastopol.
Army Group Centre was informed that extensive withdrawals could
not be countenanced because of the wholesale loss of heavy
weapons which would ensue. ‘With personal commitment of the
Commander, subordinate commanders, and officers, the troops were
to be compelled to fanatical resistance in their positions without
respect for the enemy breaking through on the flanks or rear.’

Hitler’s decision that there should be no retreat, conveyed to
Brauchitsch and Halder in the night of 16-17 December, was his
own. But it seems to have taken Bock’s assessment as the
justification for the high-risk tactic of no-retreat. His order stated:
‘There can be no question of a withdrawal. Only in some places has
there been deep penetration by the enemy. Setting up rear positions
is fantasy. The front is suffering from one thing only: the enemy has
more soldiers. It doesn’t have more artillery. It’s much worse than
we are.’

On 13 December, Field-Marshal von Bock had submitted to
Brauchitsch his request to be relieved of his command, since, so he
claimed, he had not overcome the consequences of his earlier
illness. Five days later, Hitler had Brauchitsch inform Bock that the
request for leave was granted. Kluge took over the command of
Army Group Centre. On 19 December it was the turn — long
overdue — of the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, Field-Marshal
Walther von Brauchitsch, to depart.

Brauchitsch’s sacking had been on the cards for some time.
Hitler’s military adjutants had been speculating over his
replacement since mid-November. His health had for weeks been
very poor. He had suffered a serious heart attack in mid-November.
At the beginning of December, his health, Halder noted, was ‘again
giving cause for concern’ under the pressure of constant worrying.
Hitler spoke of him even in November as ‘a totally sick man, at the
end of his tether’. Squeezed in the conflict between Hitler and
Halder, Brauchitsch’s position was indeed unenviable. But his own
feebleness had contributed markedly to his misery. Constantly
trying to balance demands from his Army Group Commanders and
from Halder with the need to please Hitler, his weakness and
compliance had left him ever more exposed in the gathering crisis
to a Leader who from the start lacked confidence in his army
leadership and was determined to intervene in tactical dispositions.
It was recognized by those who saw the way Hitler treated him that
Brauchitsch was no longer up to the job. Brauchitsch, for his part,
was anxious to resign, and tried to do so immediately following the

start of the Soviet counter-offensive in the first week of December.
He thought of Kluge or Manstein as possible successors.

Hitler disingenuously told Schmundt at the time (and commented
along similar lines to his Luftwaffe adjutant, Nicolaus von Below,
two days later) that he was clueless about a replacement. Schmundt
had for some time favoured Hitler himself taking over as head of
the army, to restore confidence, and now put this to him. Hitler said
he would think about it. According to Below, it was in the night of
16-17 December that Hitler finally decided to take on the supreme
command of the army himself. The names of Manstein and
Kesselring were thrown momentarily into the ring. But Hitler did
not like Manstein, brilliant commander though he was. And Field-
Marshal Albert Kesselring, known as a tough and capable organizer,
and an eternal optimist, was earmarked for command of the
Luftwaffe in the Mediterranean (and, perhaps, was thought to be
too much in Goring’s pocket). In any case, Hitler had convinced
himself by this time that being in charge of the army was no more
than a ‘little matter of operational command’ that ‘anyone can do’.
Halder, who, it might have been imagined, would have had most to
lose by the change-over, in fact appears to have welcomed it. He
seems briefly to have deluded himself that through this move,
taking him directly into Hitler’s presence in decision-making, he
might expand his own influence to matters concerning the entire
Wehrmacht. Keitel put an early stop to any such pretensions,
ensuring that, as before, Halder’s responsibilities were confined to
strictly army concerns.

Hitler’s takeover of the supreme command of the army was
formally announced on 19 December. In one sense, since
Brauchitsch had been increasingly bypassed during the deepening
crisis, the change was less fundamental than it appeared. But it
meant, nevertheless, that Hitler was now taking over direct
responsibility for tactics, as well as grand strategy. He was absurdly
overloading himself still further. And his takeover of direct
command of the army would deprive him, in the eyes of the
German public, of scapegoats for future military disasters.

Immediately on the heels of the announcement of Brauchitsch’s
resignation came an even plainer sign of crisis in the east. On 20
December, Hitler published an appeal to the German people to send
warm winter clothing for the troops in the east. Goebbels listed all
the items of clothes to be handed in during a lengthy radio
broadcast that evening. The population responded with shock and
anger — astonished and bitter that the leadership had not made
proper provision for basic necessities for their loved ones fighting at
the front and exposed to a merciless, polar winter.

Also on the day after Brauchitsch’s dismissal, Hitler sent a
strongly worded directive to Army Group Centre, reaffirming the
order issued four days earlier to hold position and fight to the last
man. ‘The fanatical will to defend the ground on which the troops
are standing,’ ran the directive, ‘must be injected into the troops
with every possible means, even the toughest ... Talk of Napoleon’s
retreat is threatening to become reality. Thus, there must only be a
withdrawal where there is a prepared position further in the rear.’
Where a systematic withdrawal was to take place, Hitler ordered
the most brutal scorched-earth policy. ‘Every piece of territory
which is forced to be left to the enemy must be made unusable for
him as far as possible. Every place of habitation must be burnt
down and destroyed without consideration for the population, to
deprive the enemy of all possibility of shelter.’

One commander more unwilling than most to accept Hitler’s ‘Halt
Order’ lying down was the panzer hero Guderian. Through
Schmundt, Guderian had a direct line to Hitler. He made use of it to
arrange a special meeting at Fuhrer Headquarters where he could
put his case for withdrawal openly to Hitler. Guderian had his own
way of dealing with military orders which he found unacceptable.
With Bock’s connivance, he had tacitly ignored or bypassed early
orders, usually by acting first and notifying later. But with Bock’s
replacement by Kluge, that changed. Guderian and Kluge did not
get on. Hitler was well informed of Guderian’s ‘unorthodoxy’. It is
perhaps surprising, then, that he was still prepared to grant the tank

commander an audience, lasting five hours, on 20 December, and
allow him to put his case at length.

All Hitler’s military entourage were present. Guderian informed
him of the state of the 2nd Panzer Army and 2nd Army, and his
intention of retreating. Hitler expressly forbade this. But Guderian
was not telling the whole story. The retreat, for which he had
presumed to receive authorization from Brauchitsch six days earlier,
was already under way. Hitler was unremitting. He said that the
troops should dig in where they stood and hold every square yard of
land. Guderian pointed out that the earth was frozen to a depth of
five feet. Hitler rejoined that they would then have to blast craters
with howitzers, as had been done in Flanders during the First World
War. Guderian quietly pointed out that ground conditions in
Flanders and Russia in midwinter were scarcely comparable. Hitler
insisted on his order. Guderian objected that the loss of life would
be enormous; Hitler pointed to the ‘sacrifice’ of Frederick the
Great’s men. ‘Do you think Frederick the Great’s grenadiers were
anxious to die?’ Hitler retorted. ‘They wanted to live, too, but the
King was right in asking them to sacrifice themselves. I believe that
I, too, am entitled to ask any German soldier to lay down his life.’
He thought Guderian was too close to the suffering of his troops,
and had too much pity for them. ‘You should stand back more,’ he
suggested. ‘Believe me, things appear clearer when examined at
longer range.’

Guderian returned to the front empty-handed. Within days, Kluge
had requested the tank commander’s removal, and on 26 December,
Guderian was informed of his dismissal. He was far from the last of
the top-line generals to fall from grace during the winter crisis.
Within the following three weeks Generals Helmuth Forster, Hans
Graf von Sponeck, Erich Hoepner, and Adolf Strauf$ were sacked,
Field-Marshal von Leeb was relieved of his command of Army
Group North, and Field-Marshal von Reichenau died of a stroke.
Sponeck was sentenced to death — subsequently commuted — for
withdrawing his troops from the Kerch peninsula on the Crimean
front. Hoepner, also for retreating, was summarily expelled from

the army with loss of all his pension rights. By the time that the
crisis was overcome, in spring, numerous subordinate commanders
had also been replaced.

It was mid-January before Hitler was prepared to concede the
tactical withdrawal for which Kluge had been pleading. By the end
of the month, the worst was over. The eastern front, at enormous
cost, had been stabilized. Hitler claimed full credit for this. It was,
in his eyes, once more a ‘triumph of the will’. Looking back, a few
months later, he blamed the winter crisis on an almost complete
failure of leadership in the army. One general had come to him, he
said, wanting to retreat. It was plain to him, he went on, that a
retreat would have meant ‘the fate of Napoleon’. He had ruled out
any retreat at all. ‘And I pulled it off ! That we overcame this winter
and are today in the position again to proceed victoriously ... is
solely attributable to the bravery of the soldiers at the front and my
firm will to hold out, cost what it may.’

Salvation through the Fuhrer’s genius was, of course, the line
adopted (and believed) by Goebbels and other Nazi leaders. Their
public statements combined pure faith and impure propaganda. But
despite Halder’s outright condemnation — after the war — of Hitler’s
‘Halt Order’, not all military experts were so ready to interpret it as
a catastrophic mistake. Kluge’s Chief of Staff, General Guenther
Blumentritt, for instance, was prepared to acknowledge that the
determination to stand fast was both correct and decisive in
avoiding a much bigger disaster than actually occurred.

Hitler’s early recognition of the dangers of a full-scale collapse of
the front, and the utterly ruthless determination with which he
resisted demands to retreat, probably did play a part in avoiding a
calamity of Napoleonic proportions. But, had he been less inflexible,
and paid greater heed to some of the advice coming from his field
commanders, the likelihood is that the same end could have been
achieved with far smaller loss of life. Moreover, stabilization was
finally achieved only after he had relaxed the ‘Halt Order’ and
agreed to a tactical withdrawal to form a new front line.

The strains of the winter crisis had left their mark on Hitler. He
was now showing unmistakable signs of physical wear and tear.
Goebbels was shocked when he saw him in March. Hitler looked
grey, and much aged. He admitted to his Propaganda Minister that
he had for some time felt ill and often faint. The winter, he
acknowledged, had also affected him psychologically. But he
appeared to have withstood the worst. His confidence was, certainly
to all outward appearances, undiminished. Hints, given in the
autumn, of doubts at the outcome of the war, were no longer heard.
Against what had seemed in the depths of the winter crisis almost
insuperable odds, Germany was ready by spring to launch another
offensive in the east.

The war still had a long way to go. Certainly, the balance of
forces at this juncture was by no means one-sided. And the course of
events would undergo many vagaries before defeat for Germany
appeared inexorable. But the winter of 1941-2 can nevertheless, in
retrospect, be seen to be not merely a turning-point, but the
beginning of the end. Though it would not become fully plain for
some months, Hitler’s gamble, on which he had staked nothing less
than the future of the nation, had disastrously failed.

21
Fulfilling the ‘Prophecy’

It was no accident that the war in the east led to genocide. The
ideological objective of eradicating ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’ was central,
not peripheral, to what had been deliberately designed as a ‘war of
annihilation’. It was inseparably bound up with the military
campaign. With the murderous onslaught of the Einsatzgruppen,
backed by the Wehrmacht, launched in the first days of the
invasion, the genocidal character of the conflict was already
established. It would rapidly develop into an all-out genocidal
programme, the like of which the world had never seen.

Hitler spoke a good deal during the summer and autumn of 1941
to his close entourage in the most brutal terms imaginable, about
his ideological aims in crushing the Soviet Union. During the same
months, he also spoke on numerous occasions in his monologues in
the Fiihrer Headquarters — though invariably in barbaric
generalizations — about the Jews. These were the months in which,
out of the contradictions and lack of clarity of anti-Jewish policy, a
programme to kill all the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe began to
take concrete shape.

In contrast to military affairs, where his repeated interference
reflected his constant preoccupation with tactical minutiae and his
distrust of the army professionals, Hitler’s involvement in
ideological matters was less frequent and less direct. He had laid
down the guidelines in March 1941. He needed to do little more.
Self-combustion would see to it that, once lit, the genocidal fires
would rage into a mighty conflagration amid the barbarism of the
war to destroy ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’. When it came to ideological

aims, in contrast to military matters, Hitler had no need to worry
that the ‘professionals’ would let him down. He could rest assured
that Himmler and Heydrich, above all, would leave no stone
unturned in eliminating the ideological enemy once and for all. And
he could be equally certain that they would find willing helpers at
all levels among the masters of the new Imperium in the east,
whether these belonged to the party, the police, or the civilian
bureaucracy. Organization, planning, and execution could
confidently be left to others. There was no shortage of those keen to
‘carry out practical work for our Fuhrer’, as one lowly police officer
put it. It was sufficient that his authorization for the major steps
was provided; and that he could take for granted that, with regard
to the ‘Jewish Question’, his ‘prophecy’ of 1939 was being fulfilled.

On the eve of ‘Barbarossa’, Hitler had assured Hans Frank that
the Jews would be ‘removed’ from the General Government ‘in the
foreseeable future’. Frank’s province could therefore be regarded
merely as a type of ‘transit camp’. Frank registered the pleasure at
being able to ‘get rid’ of the Jews from the General Government,
and remarked that Jewry was ‘gradually perishing’ in Poland. ‘The
Fuhrer had indeed prophesied that for the Jews,’ commented
Goebbels. From early in the year the intention had been, as we
noted, to deport the Jews from Frank’s domain to the east,
following the victory over the Soviet Union — expected by the
autumn. The Jews from Poland, then from the rest of Europe,
would be wiped out in the east within a few years by starvation and
being worked to death in the icy wastes of an arctic climate. For
those incapable of work, the intended fate, if not spelled out, was
not difficult to imagine.

The 5-6 million Jews of the USSR were included in the wholesale
resettlement scheme for the racial reordering of eastern Europe, the
‘General Plan for the East’ which Himmler, two days after the
launch of ‘Barbarossa’, had commissioned his settlement planners to
prepare. The Plan envisaged the deportation over the subsequent
thirty years of 31 million persons, mainly Slavs, beyond the Urals
and into western Siberia. Without doubt, the Jews would have been

the first ethnic group to perish in a territorial solution which, for
them, was tantamount to their death warrant. What was intended
was in itself plainly genocidal. The ‘territorial solution’ could,
therefore, be seen as a type of intended ‘final solution’. But shooting
or gassing to death all the Jews of Europe — the full-scale
industrialized killing programme that evolved over the following
months into what would then be a differently defined ‘final solution’
— was at this stage not in mind.

Reinhard Heydrich had already in March received the green light
from Hitler to send the Einsatzgruppen into the Soviet Union in the
wake of the Wehrmacht to ‘pacify’ the conquered areas by
eradicating ‘subversive elements’. According to a letter which
Heydrich sent on 2 July to the four newly appointed Higher SS and
Police Leaders for the conquered areas of the Soviet Union, the
Einsatzgruppen had been instructed to liquidate, alongside
Communist functionaries and an array of ‘extremist elements’, ‘all
Jews in the service of the party and state’. Heydrich’s verbal
briefings must have made clear that the widest interpretation was to
be placed on such an instruction.

From the beginning, the killings were far from confined to Jews
who were Communist Party or state functionaries. Already on 3
July, for instance, the chief of the Einsatzkommando in Luzk in
eastern Poland had some 1,160 Jewish men shot. He said he wanted
to put his stamp on the town. In Kowno in Lithuania as many as
2,514 Jews were shot on 6 July. Shootings were carried out by
Einsatzkommando 3, based in this area, on twenty days in July. Of
the ‘executions’, totalling 4,400 (according to a meticulous listing),
the vast majority were Jews. But the briefings had evidently not
been unambiguous. They were capable of being interpreted in
different ways. Whereas Einsatzgruppe A, in the Baltic, was almost
unconstrained in its killing, Einsatzgruppe B in White Russia
initially targeted, in the main, the Jewish ‘intelligentsia’, while
Einsatzgruppe C spoke of working the Jews to death in reclaiming
the Pripet Marshes. While some Einsatzkommandos were
slaughtering Jews more or less indiscriminately, one killer squad in

Chotin on the Dnjestr confined its murderous action in early July to
Communist and Jewish ‘intellectuals’ (apart from doctors).

In the Baltic, the butchery of Einsatzgruppe A was especially
ferocious. The first massacre of Jews took place on 24 June, only
two days after the beginning of ‘Barbarossa’, in the small Lithuanian
township of Gargzdai, lying just behind the border. Men from the
Security Police and a police unit from Memel shot dead 201 Jews
that afternoon. By 18 July, the killing squads had claimed 3,300
victims; by August the death-toll had reached between 10,000 and
12,000 mainly male Jews together with Communists.

The killing units were assisted in the early stages by Lithuanian
nationalists who were prompted into savage pogroms against the
Jews. In Kowno, Jews were clubbed to death one by one by a local
enthusiast while crowds of onlookers — women holding their
children up to see — clapped and cheered. One eye-witness recalled
that around forty-five to fifty Jews were killed in this way within
three-quarters of an hour. When the butcher had finished his
slaughter, he climbed on to the heap of corpses and played the
Lithuanian national anthem on an accordion. German soldiers stood
by impassively, some of them taking photographs. The Wehrmacht
commander in the area, General-Colonel Ernst Busch, took the view,
on hearing reports of the atrocities, that it was a matter of internal
Lithuanian disputes, and that he had no authority to intervene. It
was seen as exclusively a matter for the security police.

Hitler was keen to keep abreast of the killing operations in the
Soviet Union. On 1 August SS-Brigadefthrer Heinrich Miller, head
of the Gestapo, had passed an enciphered message to the
commanders of the four Einsatzgruppen: ‘Continual reports from
here on the work of the Einsatzgruppen in the east are to be
presented to the Fuhrer.’

Goebbels registered his satisfaction, when he received a detailed
report in mid-August, at the information that ‘vengeance was being
wreaked on the Jews in the big towns’ of the Baltic, and that they
were ‘being slain in their masses on the streets by the self-
protection organizations’. He connected the killing directly with

Hitler’s ‘prophecy’ of January 1939. ‘What the Fuhrer prophesied is
now taking place,’ he wrote, ‘that if Jewry succeeded in provoking
another war, it would lose its existence.’ Three months later, when
he visited Vilna, Goebbels spoke again of the ‘horrible’ ‘revenge’ of
the local population against the Jews, who had been ‘shot down in
their thousands’ and were still being ‘executed’ by the hundred. The
rest had been impressed into ghettos and worked for the benefit of
the local economy. The ghetto inhabitants, he commented, were
‘vile figures’. He described the Jews as ‘the lice of civilized
mankind. They had to be somehow eradicated, otherwise they
would always again play their torturing and burdensome role. The
only way to cope with them is to treat them with the necessary
brutality. If you spare them, you'll later be their victim.’

Such were the extreme, pathological expressions of sentiments
which, often in scarcely less overtly genocidal form, had a wide
currency among the new masters of the eastern territories, and
were far from confined to diehard Nazis.

In contrast to the conflicts between the Wehrmacht and the SS
following the invasion of Poland, the close cooperation established
between Heydrich and the army leadership in the build-up to
‘Barbarossa’ enabled the barbarity of the Einsatzgruppen in the
eastern campaign to proceed without hindrance, and often in close
harmony. The Wehrmacht leadership aligned itself from the start
with the ideological aim of combating ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’.
Cooperation with the SD and Security Police was extensive, and
willingly given. Without it, the Einsatzgruppen could not have
functioned as they did. ‘The relationship to the Wehrmacht is now,
as before, wholly untroubled,’ ran an Einsatzgruppe report in mid-
August. ‘Above all, a constantly growing interest in and
understanding for the tasks and business of the work of the Security
Police can be seen in Wehrmacht circles. This could especially be
observed at the executions.’

In an order issued on 12 September 1941, the head of the OKW,
Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, declared: ‘The struggle against
Bolshevism demands ruthless and energetic, rigorous action above

all against the Jews, the main carriers of Bolshevism.’ Other
exhortations from military leaders went still further. A month later,
the emphatically pro-Nazi Field-Marshal Walter von Reichenau,
Commander-in-Chief of the 6th Army, told his troops: ‘The soldier
in the eastern sphere is not only a fighter according to the rules of
the art of warfare, but also the bearer of a pitiless racial (volkisch)
ideology and the avenger of all the bestialities which have been
inflicted on the German and related ethnic nation. The soldier must
therefore have full understanding for the necessity of the severe but
just atonement from the Jewish subhumans.’ He concluded: ‘Only in
this way will we fulfil our historic duty of liberating the German
people from the Asiatic-Jewish threat once and for all.’

The Commander-in-Chief of the 17th Army, Colonel-General
Hermann Hoth, went, if anything, even further than Reichenau. He
spoke in an order on the ‘Behaviour of German Soldiers in the East’,
issued on 17 November, of a struggle of ‘two inwardly unbridgeable
philosophies ... German feeling of honour and race, centuries-old
German soldierly tradition, against asiatic ways of thinking and
primitive instincts whipped up by a small number of mainly Jewish
intellectuals’. His men should act out of ‘belief in a change in the
times, in which, on the basis of the superiority of its race and
achievements, the leadership of Europe has passed to the German
people’. It was a ‘mission to rescue European culture from the
advance of asiatic barbarism’. He pointed to the way the Red Army
had ‘bestially murdered’ German soldiers. Any sympathy with the
native population was wholly misplaced. He stressed the guilt of
Jews for circumstances in Germany after the First World War. He
saw the extermination of the ‘spiritual support of Bolshevism’ and
‘aid of the partisans’ as ‘a rule of self-preservation’.

Towards the end of November, the Commander-in-Chief of the
11th Army, Erich von Manstein, in a secret order to his troops, was
equally uncompromising. The German people had stood since 22
June, he stated, in a life-and-death struggle against the Bolshevik
system, which was not being fought according to traditional
European rules of war. The clear implication was that a Soviet

regime dominated by Jews was responsible for this. Manstein
referred to the Soviet partisan war behind the front lines. Jewry,
with ‘all the key-points of the political leadership and
administration, trade, and crafts’ in their hands, formed, he claimed,
the ‘intermediary between the enemy in the rear and the remainder
still fighting of the Red Army and Red Leadership’. From this, he
drew his conclusion. “The Jewish-Bolshevik system must be
eradicated once and for all,’ he wrote. ‘Never again must it enter
into our European living space. The German soldier has the task,
therefore, not solely of smashing the military means of power of
this system. He is also the bearer of a racial idea and avenger of all
atrocities perpetrated on him and the German people ... The soldier
must show sympathy for the necessity of the hard atonement
demanded of Jewry, the spiritual bearer of the Bolshevik terror ...’

Other army commanders increasingly used the spread of partisan
warfare as justification for the no-holds-barred treatment of the
Jews. Already in the first weeks of ‘Barbarossa’, Jews were being
equated with partisans by some commanders or seen as the major
source of their support. But the ‘partisan struggle’ only began in
earnest in the autumn. In the rear area of Army Group Centre, a
‘seminar’ was organized in September 1941 to allow an exchange of
views and experiences between selected officers and leading SS
spokesmen on the ‘combating of partisans’. The participants took
away from their ‘orientation course’ the plain message to serve as
the guideline for future ‘pacification’ policy: ‘Where there’s a
partisan, there’s a Jew, and where there’s a Jew, there’s a partisan.’

Such voices were influential. There were, however, others. Some
commanders insisted on rigorous separation of the Wehrmacht from
the actions of the Security Police. One of these, General Karl von
Roques, put out an order at the end of July prohibiting any
participation by his men in pogroms on the grounds that it was
‘unsoldierly’ and would seriously damage the standing of the
Wehrmacht. However, his order was ineffective. Cases continued to
occur in which ‘soldiers and also officers had independently
undertaken shootings of Jews or participated in them’. In

September, he was forced to issue another order, in which he
repeated that ‘executive measures’, especially against Jews, were
solely the province of the Higher SS and Police Leader, and any
unauthorized shootings by individual soldiers, or participation in
‘executive measures’ of the SS and police would be treated as
disobedience and subjected to disciplinary action.

From letters home from the front, it is plain that many ordinary
German soldiers needed little persuasion that the merciless
onslaught on the Jews was justified. Subjected for years to incessant
indoctrination at school and in the Hitler Youth about the Jews, and
inundated since the beginning of ‘Barbarossa’ with propaganda
about horrors of ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’, on the march into Russia they
frequently looked to confirm their prejudices. One soldier, writing
home in July, remarked on his shock at ‘evidence of Jewish,
Bolshevik atrocities, the likes of which I have hardly believed
possible’, and promised that he and his comrades were taking
revenge. Another wrote, also in July: ‘Everyone, even the last
doubter, knows today that the battle against these subhumans,
who’ve been whipped into a frenzy by the Jews, was not only
necessary but came in the nick of time. Our Fuhrer has saved
Europe from certain chaos.’ Given such a mentality, it was not
surprising that many Wehrmacht units were themselves involved in
the shooting of Jews and other atrocities from the earliest phase of
‘Barbarossa’.

In the early weeks of ‘Barbarossa’, the ‘actions’ undertaken by the
Einsatzgruppen and their sub-units mainly targeted male Jews. The
killing, though horrifying, was on nothing like the scale that it
reached from August onwards. One particularly murderous
Einsatzkommando in Lithuania, for example, killed nine times as
many Jews in August and fourteen times as many in September as it
had done in July. What was regarded as a large-scale ‘action’ in the
first weeks had usually involved the shooting of hundreds of Jews,
in rare instances more than 1,000. But by the beginning of October
Einsatzkommando 4a, attached to Einsatzgruppe C in the Ukraine,
could report with cold precision: ‘In retaliation for the arson in

Kiev, all Jews were arrested and on 29 and 30.9 a total of 33,771
Jews were executed.’ This was the notorious massacre at Babi-Yar,
outside Kiev. The Jews — many of them women, children, and old
people — had been rounded up in retaliation for a series of
explosions in the city, killing some hundreds of German soldiers, a
few days earlier, just before Kiev had fallen to the Wehrmacht.
They were marched in small groups to the outskirts of the city,
forced to undress, then to stand on a mound above the ravine of
Babi-Yar. As the repeated salvoes of the killing-squads rang out, the
lifeless bodies of the victims fell on to the growing mound of
corpses below them.

Women and children — seen as possible ‘avengers’ of the future —
were now, following verbal instructions passed down the line by
Himmler, then by the commanders of the various killer squads
during August, generally included in the massacres. Thus,
Einsatzkommando 3 shot 135 women among 4,239 Jews ‘executed’
during July, but 26,243 women and 15,112 children in the total of
56,459 Jews murdered during September 1941. Taking the four
Einsatzgruppen and their sub-units together, the Jews killed before
mid-August numbered around 50,000 — a massive increase on the
scale of the murders in Poland, but only a tenth of the estimated
half a million who would perish in the next four months.

The huge increase in number of victims demanded different
killing techniques. At first, a semblance of martial law and
‘execution’ by firing-squad was preserved. But after a few weeks,
the killers took turns with a sub-machine gun, mowing down their
naked victims as they knelt at the edge of a pit.

The actual variation in the scale of the killing operations in the
first weeks, and the sharp escalation from around August onwards,
strongly suggests that no general mandate to exterminate Soviet
Jewry in its entirety had been issued before ‘Barbarossa’ began. The
number of men — around 3,000 in all, the core drawn heavily from
the Gestapo, criminal police, regular police (Ordnungspolizei), and
SD - initially engaged in the Einsatzgruppen actions would, in any
case, have been incapable of implementing a full-scale genocidal

programme, and could scarcely have been assembled with one in
mind. The sharp increase in their numbers through supplementary
police battalions began in late July. By the end of the year, there
were eleven times as many members of the killing units as had been
present at the start of ‘Barbarossa’.

On 15 August, immediately after witnessing that morning an
‘execution’ of Jews near Minsk which made him feel sick, Himmler
had told his men that he and Hitler would answer to history for the
necessary extermination of Jews as ‘the carriers of world
Bolshevism’. It was during his visits to the killing units in the east
that month that Himmler instructed them to widen the slaughter,
now to include women and children. Had he received explicit new
authorization from Hitler? Or did he presume that the Fthrer’s
existing mandate sufficed for the massive extension of the killing
operations?

While in FHQ in mid-July, Himmler had received minutes of the
important meeting that Hitler had had on the 16th with Goring,
Bormann, Lammers, Keitel, and Rosenberg. At the meeting, Hitler
had made the telling remarks that the partisan war proclaimed by
Stalin provided ‘the possibility of exterminating anything opposing
us’ and that pacification of the conquered territory could best be
achieved by shooting dead anyone ‘who even looked askance’. A
day later, Hitler issued a decree giving Himmler responsibility for
security in the newly established civilian regions of German rule in
the east. Effectively, this placed the ‘Jewish Question’ as part of a
wider policing remit directly in Himmler’s hands.

Within a week, Himmler had increased the ‘policing’ operations
behind the front line in the east by 11,000 men, the start of the far
bigger build-up that was to follow. Most probably, catching Hitler’s
mood at the time, Himmler had pointed out the insufficiency of the
forces currently available to him for the ‘pacification’ of the east,
then requested, and been granted, the authority to increase the
force to an appropriate level. That the Jews, as had been the case
from the beginning of the campaign, were viewed as the prime
target group to be exterminated — under the pretext of offering the

most dangerous opposition to the occupation — would have meant
that no specific mandate about their treatment within the general
‘pacification’ remit was necessary. In dealing with the Jews in the
east as he saw fit, Himmler could take it for granted that he was
‘working towards the Fuhrer’.

Hitler’s own comments about the Jews around this time would
certainly have assured Himmler of this. In the twilight hours before
dawn on 10 July, Hitler had remarked: ‘ “I feel like the Robert Koch
of politics. He found the bacillus of tuberculosis and through that
showed medical scholarship new ways. I discovered the Jews as the
bacillus and ferment of all social decomposition. Their ferment. And
I have proved one thing: that a state can live without Jews... ”’

He retained his biological terminology when speaking — with
remarkable openness — to the Defence Minister of the newly
created, brutally racist state of Croatia, Marshal Sladko Kvaternik,
on 22 July. Hitler called Jews ‘the scourge of mankind’. ‘Jewish
commissars’ had wielded brutal power in the Baltic, he stated. And
now the Lithuanians, Estonians, and Latvians were taking ‘bloody
revenge’ against them. He went on: ‘If the Jews had free rein as in
the Soviet paradise, they would put the most insane plans into
effect. Thus Russia has become a plague-centre for mankind ... For
if only one state tolerates a Jewish family among it, this would
provide the core bacillus for a new decomposition. If there were no
more Jews in Europe, the unity of the European states would be no
longer disturbed. Where the Jews are sent to, whether to Siberia or
Madagascar, is immaterial.’

The frame of mind was overtly genocidal. The reference to
Madagascar was meaningless. It had been ruled out as an option
months earlier. But Siberia, which had in the interim come into
favour, would itself have meant genocide of a kind. And, from his
comments to Kvaternik, Hitler was plainly contemplating a ‘solution

to the Jewish Question’ not just in the Soviet Union, but throughout
the whole of Europe.

No decision for the ‘Final Solution’ - meaning the physical
extermination of the Jews throughout Europe — had yet been taken.
But genocide was in the air. In the Warthegau, the biggest of the
annexed areas of Poland, the Nazi authorities were still divided in
July 1941 about what to do with the Jews whom they had been
unable to deport to the General Government. One idea was to
concentrate them in one huge camp which could easily be policed,
near to the centre of coal production, and gain maximum economic
benefit from their ruthless exploitation. But there was the question
of what to do about those Jews incapable of working.

A memorandum sent on 16 July 1941 to Eichmann, at Reich
Security Head Office, by the head of the SD in Posen, SS-
Sturmbannftihrer Rolf-Heinz Hoppner, struck an ominous note.
‘There is the danger this winter,’ his cynical report to Eichmann
read, ‘that the Jews can no longer all be fed. It is to be seriously
considered whether the most humane solution might not be to finish
off those Jews not capable of labour by some sort of fast-working
preparation.’ Asking for Eichmann’s opinion, Hoppner concluded:
‘The things sound in part fantastic, but would in my view be quite
capable of implementation.’

On the last day of the month, Heydrich had Eichmann draft a
written authorization from Goring — nominally in charge of anti-
Jewish policy since January 1939 - to prepare ‘a complete solution
of the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe’.
The mandate was framed as a supplement to the task accorded to
Heydrich on 24 January 1939, to solve the ‘Jewish problem’
through ‘emigration’ and ‘evacuation’. Heydrich was now
commissioned to produce an overall plan dealing with the
organizational, technical, and material measures necessary. This
written mandate was an extension of the verbal one which he had
already received from Goring no later than March. It enhanced his
authority in dealings with state authorities, and laid down a marker
for his control over the ‘final solution’ once victory in the east —

presumed imminent — had been won. There was no need to consult
Hitler.

The dragnet was closing on the Jews of Europe. But Heydrich’s
mandate was not the signal to set up death camps in Poland. The
aim at this point was still a territorial solution — to remove the Jews
to the east. Within the next few months, recognition that the great
gamble of the rapid knockout victory in the east had failed would
irrevocably alter that aim.

Ill

With victory apparently within Germany’s grasp, pressures to
intensify the discrimination against the Jews and to have them
deported from the Reich were building up. The growing privations
of the war allowed party activists to turn daily grievances and
resentment against the Jews. The SD in Bielefeld reported, for
instance, in August 1941 that strong feeling about the ‘provocative
behaviour of Jews’ had brought a ban on Jews attending the weekly
markets ‘in order to avoid acts of violence’. In addition, there had
been general approval, so it was alleged, for an announcement in
the local newspapers that Jews would receive no compensation for
damage suffered as a result of the war. It was also keenly felt, it
was asserted, that Jews should only be served in shops once German
customers had had their turn. The threat of resort to self-help and
use of force against Jews if nothing was done hung in the air.
Ominously, it was nonetheless claimed that these measures would
not be enough to satisfy the population. Demands were growing for
the introduction of some compulsory mark of identification such as
had been worn by Jews in the General Government since the start
of the war, in order to prevent Jews from avoiding the restrictions
imposed on them.

Evidently, party fanatics were at work — successfully, so it seems
— in stirring up opinion against the Jews. The pressure from below
was music to the ears of party and police leaders like Goebbels and
Heydrich anxious for their own reasons to step up discrimination

against the Jews and remove them altogether from Germany as
soon as possible. It did not take long for it to be fed through
Goebbels to Hitler himself.

An identification mark for Jews was something Hitler had turned
down when it had been demanded in the aftermath of ‘Crystal
Night’. He had not thought it expedient at the time. But he was now
to be subjected to renewed pressure to change his mind. By mid-
August, Goebbels had convinced himself that the ‘Jewish Question’
in Berlin had again become ‘acute’. He claimed soldiers on leave
could not understand how Jews in Berlin could still have ‘aryan’
servants and big apartments. Jews were undermining morale
through comments in queues or on public transport. He thought it
necessary, therefore, that they should wear a badge so that they
could be immediately recognized.

Three days later a hastily summoned meeting at the Ministry of
Propaganda, filled with party hacks, attempted to persuade
representatives from other ministries of the need to introduce
identification for the Jews. Eichmann, the RSHA (Reich Security
Main Office) representative, reported that Heydrich had already put
a proposal to this effect to Goring a short while earlier. Goring had
sent it back, saying the Fiihrer had to decide. On this, Heydrich had
reformulated his proposal, which would be sent to Bormann, for
him to speak to Hitler about it. The view from the Propaganda
Ministry embroidered upon the remarks Goebbels had entrusted to
his diary a few days earlier. The Jews of Berlin, it was alleged,
were a ‘centre of agitation’, occupying much-needed apartments.
Among other things, they were responsible, through their hoarding
of food, even for the shortage of strawberries in the capital. Soldiers
on leave from the east could not comprehend that Jews were still
allowed such licence. Most of the Jews were not in employment.
These should be ‘carted off’ to Russia. ‘It would be best to kill them
altogether.’ On the question of ‘evacuation of the Jews from the Old
Reich’, Eichmann commented that Heydrich had put a proposal to
the Fithrer, but that this had been refused, and that the Security
Police Chief was now working on an amended proposal for the

partial ‘evacuation’ of Jews from major cities. Given the alleged
urgency of the need to protect the mood of the front soldiers,
Goebbels, it was announced, intended to seek an audience with the
Fuhrer at the earliest opportunity.

This was the purpose of the Propaganda Minister’s visit to FHQ
on 18 August. He encountered a Hitler recovering from illness, in
the middle of a running conflict with his army leaders, in a state of
nervous tension, and highly irritable. In this condition, Hitler was
doubtless all the more open to radical suggestions. Eventually
raising the ‘Jewish problem’, Goebbels undoubtedly repeated the
allegations about Jews damaging morale, especially that of front
soldiers. He was pushing at an open door. Hitler must have been
reminded of the poor morale which had so disgusted him in Berlin
and Munich towards the end of the First World War, for which he
(and many others) had blamed the Jews. He granted Goebbels what
the Propaganda Minister had come for: permission to force the Jews
to wear a badge of identification. According to Goebbels, Hitler
expressed his conviction that his Reichstag ‘prophecy’ — that ‘if
Jewry succeeded in again provoking a world war, it would end in
the destruction of the Jews’ — was coming about with a ‘certainty to
be thought almost uncanny’. The Jews in the east were having to
pay the bill, noted Goebbels. Jewry was an alien body among
cultural nations. ‘At any rate the Jews will not have much cause to
laugh in a coming world,’ Goebbels reported him as saying.

Next day, Goebbels wrote that he would now become
immediately active in the ‘Jewish Question’, since the Fiihrer had
given him permission to introduce a large, yellow Star of David to
be worn by every Jew. Once the Jews wore this badge, Goebbels
was certain they would rapidly disappear from view in public
places. ‘If it’s for the moment not yet possible to make Berlin into a
Jew-free city, the Jews must at least no longer appear in public,’ he
remarked. ‘But beyond that, the Fuhrer has granted me permission
to deport the Jews from Berlin to the east as soon as the eastern
campaign is over.’ Jews, he added, spoiled not just the appearance
but the mood of the city. Forcing them to wear a badge would be an

improvement. But, he wrote, ‘you can only stop it altogether by
doing away with them. We have to tackle the problem without any
sentimentality.’

On 1 September, a police decree stipulated that all Jews over the
age of six had to wear the Star of David. A week later, preparing
the population for its introduction, Goebbels ensured that the party
Propaganda Department put out a special broadsheet, with massive
circulation, in its publication Wochenspriiche (Weekly Maxims),
emblazoned with Hitler’s ‘prophecy’.

According to SD reports — echoing in the main no doubt hardline
feelings in party circles — the introduction of the Yellow Star met
with general approval but, in the eyes of some, did not go far
enough, and needed to be extended to Mischlinge as well as full
Jews. Some said the Yellow Star should also be worn on the back.
Not all ordinary Germans responded in the same way as the party
radicals. There were also numerous indications of distaste and
disapproval for the introduction of the Yellow Star, along with
sympathy for the victims. It is impossible to be certain which were
the more typical responses. Open support for Jews was at any rate
dangerous. Goebbels castigated those who felt any sympathy for
their plight, threatening them with incarceration in a concentration
camp. He turned up his antisemitic invective to an even higher
volume. Whatever the level of sympathy, it could carry no weight
beside the shrill clamour of the radicals, whose demands — voiced
most notably by the Reich Minister of Propaganda — were targeted
ever more at removal of the Jews altogether. As Goebbels had
recognized, deportation had to wait. But the pressure for it would
not let up.

Much of the pressure came from the Security Police. Not
surprisingly, the Security Police in the Warthegau, where the Nazi
authorities had been trying in vain since autumn 1939 to expel the
Jews from the province, were in the front ranks. It must have been
towards the end of August that Eichmann asked the SD chief in
Posen, SS-Sturmbannfiihrer Rolf-Heinz Hoppner — the self-same
Hoppner who had written to him in July suggesting the possible

liquidation of Jews in his area who were incapable of working
during the coming winter through a ‘fast-working preparation’ — for
his views on resettlement policy and its administration.

Hoppner’s fifteen-page memorandum, sent to Eichmann on 3
September, was not concerned solely, or even mainly, with
deporting Jews, but the ‘Jewish problem’ formed nevertheless part
of his overview of the potential for extensive resettlement on racial
lines. His views corresponded closely with the ideas worked out
under the General Plan for the East (Generalplan Ost). He envisaged
deportations once the war was over ‘out of German settlement
space’ of the ‘undesirable sections of the population’ from the Great
German Reich and of peoples from eastern and south-eastern Europe
deemed racially unfit for Germanization. He specifically included
‘the ultimate solution of the Jewish Question’, not just in Germany
but also in all states under German influence, in his suggestions. The
areas he had in mind for the vast number of deportees were the
‘large spaces in the current Soviet Union’. He added that it would be
pure speculation to consider the organization of these territories
‘since first the basic decisions have to be taken’. It was essential,
however, he stated, that there should be complete clarity from the
outset about the fate of the ‘undesirables’, ‘whether the aim is to
establish for them permanently a certain form of existence, or
whether they should be completely wiped out’.

Hoppner, aware of thinking in the upper echelons of the SD, was
plainly open to ideas of killing Jews. He himself, after all, had
expressed such an idea some weeks earlier. But in early September
he was evidently not aware of any decision to exterminate the Jews
of Europe. As far as he was concerned, the goal was still their
expulsion to the available ‘spaces’ in the dismantled Soviet Union
once the war was over.

Any decision to allow the deportation of the Jews of Europe to the
east could only be taken by Hitler. He had rejected Heydrich’s

proposal to deport them only a few weeks earlier. Without Hitler’s
approval, Heydrich had been powerless to act. Hitler was even now,
in September, unwilling to take this step. He had, of course,
presumed that deportations and a final settlement of the ‘Jewish
Question’ would follow upon the victorious end of a war expected
to last four or five months. But by this time, Hitler was well aware
that this expectation had been an illusion. So practical
considerations arose. There was the question of transport. Not
enough trains were available to get supplies to the front line. That
was more urgent than shipping Jews to the east. And where were
the Jews to be sent? The areas currently under German occupation
were intended for ‘ethnic cleansing’, not as a Jewish reservation.
Soviet Jews were now being slaughtered there in thousands. But
how to deal with an influx of millions more Jews from all over
Europe into the area posed problems of an altogether different
order. Mass starvation — the fate to which Hitler was prepared to
condemn the citizens of Leningrad and Moscow - still required an
area to be made available for the Jews to be settled until they
starved to death. This had to be in territory intended for the
‘export’, not ‘import’, of ‘undesirables’. Alternatively, it could only
be in the battle-zone itself, or at least in its rear. But this was simply
an impracticality; moreover, the Einsatzgruppen had been deployed
to wipe out tens of thousands of Jews precisely in such areas; and
from Hitler’s perspective it would have meant moving the most
potent racial enemy to the place where it was most dangerous. So,
as long as the war in the east raged, Hitler must have reasoned, the
expulsion of the Jews to perish in the barren wastes to be acquired
from the Soviet Union simply had to wait.

Suddenly, in mid-September, he changed his mind. There was no
overt indication of the reason. But in August, Stalin had ordered the
deportation of the Volga Germans — Soviet citizens of German
descent who had settled in the eighteenth century along the reaches
of the Volga river. At the end of the month the entire population of
the region — more than 600,000 people — were forcibly uprooted
and deported in cattle-wagons under horrific conditions, allegedly

as ‘wreckers and spies’, to western Siberia and northern Kazakhstan.
In all, little short of a million Volga Germans fell victim to the
deportations. The news of the savage deportations had become
known in Germany in early September. Goebbels had hinted in
early September that they could prompt a radical reaction. It was
not long in coming. Alfred Rosenberg, the recently appointed Reich
Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, lost little time in
advocating ‘the deportation of all the Jews of central Europe’ to the
east in retaliation. His liaison at Army Headquarters, Otto
Brautigam, was instructed by Rosenberg on 14 September to obtain
Hitler’s approval for the proposal. Brautigam eventually succeeded
in attracting the interest of Hitler’s chief Wehrmacht adjutant,
Rudolf Schmundt, who recognized it as ‘a very important and urgent
matter’ which would be of great interest to Hitler.

Revenge and reprisal invariably played a large part in Hitler’s
motivation. But at first he hesitated. His immediate response was to
refer the matter to the Foreign Office. Ribbentrop was initially non-
committal. He wanted to discuss it personally with Hitler. Werner
Koeppen, Rosenberg’s liaison officer at FHQ, noted on 20
September: ‘The Fihrer has so far still made no decision in the
question of taking reprisals against the German Jews on account of
the treatment of the Volga Germans.’ He was said to be
contemplating making this move in the event of the United States
entering the war. Koeppen’s report was, however, already out of
date when he submitted it.

Hitler was now, in fact, ready to accept the case that it was
urgently necessary to put the long-standing plans for a
comprehensive ‘solution to the Jewish Question’ into action, and
that deportation to the east was indeed feasible despite the
unfinished war there. Why he was now prepared to bend to such
arguments lay partly, no doubt, in his acceptance that an early end
to the Russian campaign was not in sight. It was, in fact, precisely
the juncture at which he acknowledged that the war in the east
would stretch into 1942. Tackling the ‘final solution of the Jewish
Question’, he would have seen, could not wait that long. If victory

over Bolshevism had to be delayed, he must have concluded, the
time of reckoning with his most powerful adversary, the Jews,
should be postponed no longer. They had brought about the war;
they would now see his ‘prophecy’ fulfilled.

It would have been remarkable, when Himmler lunched with
Hitler at the Wolf ’s Lair on 16 September, had the deportation issue
not been raised. Almost certainly, the Reichsfithrer-SS pressed for
the Reich’s Jews to be deported. The following day, Ribbentrop met
Hitler to discuss the Rosenberg proposal. That evening, 17
September, Himmler paid the Foreign Minister a visit. By then,
Hitler must have agreed to the suggestions to start deporting
German, Austrian, and Czech Jews to the east. Himmler evidently
left with the authorization. He gave notification of the decision next
day.

On 18 September, Arthur Greiser, Reich Governor and Gauleiter
of the Warthegau, received a letter from Himmler. ‘The Ftthrer
wishes,’ ran the missive, ‘that the Old Reich and the Protectorate
[Bohemia and Moravia] are emptied and freed of Jews from the
west to the east as soon as possible.’ Himmler told Greiser that it
was his intention to deport the Jews first into the Polish territories
which had come to the Reich two years earlier, then ‘next spring to
expel them still further to the east’. With this in mind, he was
sending 60,000 Jews to the Lodz ghetto, in Greiser’s province, for
the winter.

Around the middle of September, then, Hitler had bowed to the
pressure to deport the German and Czech Jews to the east, some of
them via a temporary stay in Lodz (where the ghetto was already
known to be seriously overcrowded). It was the trigger to a crucial
new phase in the gradual emergence of a comprehensive
programme for genocide.

Hitler’s agreement to the deportation of the German Jews was
not tantamount to a decision for the ‘Final Solution’. It is doubtful
whether a single, comprehensive decision of such a kind was ever
made. But Hitler’s authorization opened the door widely to a whole
range of new initiatives from numerous local and regional Nazi

leaders who seized on the opportunity now to rid themselves of
their own ‘Jewish problem’, to start killing Jews in their own areas.
There was a perceptible quickening of the genocidal tempo over the
next few weeks. But there was as yet no coordinated,
comprehensive programme of total genocide. This would still take
some months to emerge.

Within a few days of the decision to deport the Reich Jews,
Goebbels was back at FHQ, seizing the opportunity to press once
more for the removal of the Jews from Berlin. Before his audience
with Hitler, he had the chance to speak with Reinhard Heydrich.
Himmler, Neurath, and a number of other leading figures were also
in the Wolf’s Lair. The occasion for the assembly of notables was
Hitler’s decision to ‘retire’ Neurath as Reich Protector in Prague,
following intrigues against him by radicals within the Nazi
administration in the former Czech capital, able to exploit reports of
a mounting incidence of strikes and sabotage. Levels of repression
had been relatively constrained under Neurath. But the growing
disturbances now prompted Hitler to put in a hard man, Security
Police Chief Heydrich — nominally as Deputy Reich Protector — with
a mandate to stamp out with an iron fist all forms of resistance.

Goebbels lost no time in reminding Heydrich of his wish to
‘evacuate’ the Jews from Berlin as soon as possible. Heydrich
evidently told the Propaganda Minister that this would be the case
‘as soon as we have reached a clarification of the military question
in the east. They [the Jews] should all in the end be transported
into the camps established by the Bolsheviks. These camps had been
set up by the Jews. What was more fitting, then, than that they
should now also be populated by the Jews.’

During his two-hour meeting alone with Hitler, Goebbels had no
trouble in eliciting the assurance he wanted, that Berlin would soon
be rid of its Jews. ‘The Fuhrer is of the opinion,’ Goebbels noted
down next day, ‘that the Jews have eventually to be removed from

the whole of Germany. The first cities to be made Jew-free are
Berlin, Vienna, and Prague. Berlin is first in the queue, and I have
the hope that we’ll succeed in the course of this year in transporting
a substantial portion of the Berlin Jews away to the east.’

He was in the event to be left less than wholly satisfied. He noted
towards the end of October that a beginning had been made with
deporting Berlin’s Jews. Several thousand had been sent in the first
place to Litzmannstadt (as Lodz was now officially called). But he
was soon complaining about obstacles to their rapid ‘evacuation’.
And in November he learnt from Heydrich that the deportations had
raised more difficulties than foreseen.

Goebbels kept up the pressure with a hate-filled tirade in Das
Reich — a ‘quality’ newspaper reaching over 1% million homes — on
16 November, entitled ‘The Jews are Guilty’. He explicitly cited
Hitler’s ‘prophecy’ of the ‘annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe’,
stating: ‘We are experiencing right now the fulfilment of this
prophecy.’ The fate of the Jews, he declared, was ‘hard, but more
than justified’, and any sympathy or regret was entirely misplaced.
Goebbels ordered the widest circulation of the article to the troops
on the eastern front.

The Propaganda Minister again raised the deportation of Berlin’s
Jews with Hitler during their three-hour discussion a few days later,
on 21 November. Hitler, as usual, was easily able to assuage
Goebbels. He told him he agreed with his views on the ‘Jewish
Question’. He wanted an ‘energetic policy’ against the Jews — but
one which would not ‘cause unnecessary difficulties’. The
‘evacuation of the Jews’ had to take place city by city, and it was
still uncertain when Berlin’s turn would come. When the time
arrived, the ‘evacuation’ should be concluded as quickly as possible.

Once again, as had repeatedly been the case with Frank in
Cracow and Schirach in Vienna, Hitler had raised hopes which
encouraged pressure for radical action from his subordinates. That
the hopes could be fulfilled less easily than anticipated then simply
fanned the flames, encouraging the frantic quest for an ultimate

solution to the problem which nothing but the Nazis’ own
ideological fanaticism had created in the first place.

Both Himmler and Heydrich were still speaking in October of
deporting the Jews to the east; Riga, Reval, and Minsk were all
mentioned. Plans were set in train for extermination camps in Riga
and, it seems, in Mogilew, some 130 miles east of Minsk. Transport
difficulties and continued partisan warfare eventually caused their
abandonment. But, prompted by the murderous initiatives being
undertaken by their minions, who had rapidly realized that they
were being shown a green light and lost no time in preparing to set
localized genocides in motion, the attention of the SS leaders was
starting to switch to Poland, which posed fewer logistical
difficulties, as an area in which a ‘final solution of the Jewish
Question’ could take place.

The use of poison gas had already been contemplated before the
deportation order was granted. More efficient, less public, and —
with characteristic Nazi cynicism — less stressful (for the murderers,
that is) ways of killing than mass shootings were required. Gas-
vans, already deployed in East Prussia in 1940 to kill ‘euthanasia’
victims, offered one alternative, though, it soon proved, had their
own drawbacks. Other methods, involving stationary killing
installations, were considered. At the beginning of September,
several hundred Russian prisoners-of-war were gassed in Auschwitz,
then a concentration camp mainly for Poles, as an experiment. A
large crematorium was then ordered in October from the Erfurt
firm of J. A. Topf and Sons. The poison-gas Zyklon-B was used for
the first time on the Soviet prisoners; it would by summer 1942 be
in regular use for exterminating the Jews of Europe, ferried by the
train-load to the huge killing factory of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Once the decision to deport the Reich Jews to the east had been
taken, things began to move rapidly. Heydrich told Gauleiter Alfred
Meyer, State Secretary in Rosenberg’s Ministry for the Occupied
Eastern Territories, on 4 October that attempts by industry to claim
Jews as part of their workforce ‘would vitiate the plan of a total
evacuation of the Jews from the territories occupied by us’. Later

that month, following a visit to Berlin by the Lublin Police Chief,
SS-Brigadefiihrer Odilo Globocnik, evidently aimed at instigating
the extermination of the Jews in his district, Polish labourers were
commandeered by the SS to construct a camp at Belzec in eastern
Poland. Experts on gassing techniques used on patients in the
‘euthanasia action’ followed a few weeks later, now redeployed in
Poland to advise on the gas chambers being erected at Belzec.
Initially, the aim was to use Belzec, whose murderous capacity was
in the early months relatively small, for the gassing of Jews from
the Lublin area who were incapable of work. Only gradually did the
liquidation of all Polish Jews become clarified as the goal -
embodied in what, with the addition of two other camps, Sobibor
and Treblinka, in spring 1942, came eventually to be known as
‘Aktion Reinhard’.

In the autumn, too, Eichmann was sent to Auschwitz for
discussions with Rudolf Hof, the commandant there, about gassing
installations. Mass-killing operations at Belzec began in the spring
of 1942, in Auschwitz in the summer. They had been preceded by
developments in the Warthegau. There, the first of twenty
transports in autumn 1941 bringing German Jews to Lodz had
arrived on 16 October. The authorities in Lodz had at first objected
vehemently to the order in September to take in more Jews.
Himmler was implacable. He sharply reprimanded the Government
President of Lodz, Friedrich Uebelhoer, himself the bearer of an
honorary SS rank. But alongside the reprimand, the Lodz authorities
had evidently been assuaged by being told that those Jews
incapable of working would soon be liquidated. Mass killings by
shooting and gassing (in gas-vans) were already taking place in the
autumn weeks. At the same time, Herbert Lange, head of a Special
Command which had earlier been deployed at Soldau in East Prussia
to gas the inmates of mental asylums, began looking for a suitable
location to carry out the systematic extermination of the Jews of
the Warthegau. Whether Hitler was consulted on the precise
developments or not, his overall approval was almost certainly
necessary. By the first week of December 1941, Chelmno, a gas-van

station in the south of the Warthegau, had become the first
extermination unit to commence operations.

The Warthegau was not the only area scheduled to receive the
deportees. Shortly before the killing in Chelmno commenced, the
first transports of German Jews had arrived in the Baltic. The initial
intention was to send them to Riga, to be placed in a concentration
camp outside the city prior to further deportation eastwards. Hitler
had approved proposals from the local commander of the Security
Police, SS-Sturmbannfihrer Dr Otto Lange, to set up the
concentration camp. Lange had, however, proposed erecting a camp
for Latvian Jews. This was turned, in accordance with a ‘wish’ of
the Ftthrer, into the construction of a ‘big concentration camp’ for
Jews from Germany and the Protectorate. Some 25,000 were
expected to be interned there, en route, it was said, for an eventual
destination ‘farther east’. Some Nazi leaders, at least, were well
aware by now what deportation to the east meant. When Goebbels,
still pressing to have the Jews of Berlin deported as quickly as
possible, referred in mid-December to the deportation of Jews from
the occupied part of France to the east, he said it was ‘in many cases
synonymous with the death penalty’.

By the time the first Jews were due to arrive in Riga from the
Reich, the building of the camp had scarcely begun. An improvised
solution had to be found. Instead of heading for Riga, the trains
were diverted to Kowno in Lithuania. Between 25 and 29
November, terrified and exhausted Jews were taken from five trains
arriving in Kowno from Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich, Vienna, and
Breslau and, without any selection on grounds of ability to work,
promptly taken out and shot by members of the locally based
Einsatzkommando. The same fate awaited 1,000 German Jews who
then did arrive in Riga on 30 November. They were simply taken
straight out into the forest and shot, along with some 14,000
Latvian Jews from the Riga ghetto. Himmler had earlier in the
month told the police chief in the area, Friedrich Jeckeln, ‘that all
the Jews in the Ostland down to the very last one must be
exterminated’.

However certain Jeckeln was of his murderous mandate, other
Nazi leaders in the east still had their doubts. Hinrich Lohse, Reich
Commissar for the Eastern Region (Ostland), and Wilhelm Kube,
General Commissar for Belorussia (Weifsruthenien), were among
those who were less sure that Reich Jews were meant to be
included in the mass shootings and indiscriminately slaughtered
together with the Jews from the east. They now sought urgent
clarification from the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern
Territories and from Reich Security Head Office. Lohse, pressed by
the Wehrmacht to retain Jewish skilled workers, wanted guidance
on whether or not economic criteria were relevant in determining
whether Jews were to be liquidated. In Minsk, where 12,000 Jews
from the local ghetto had been shot by the Security Police to make
way for an influx of German Jews, Kube protested that ‘people
coming from our own cultural sphere’ should be treated differently
from the ‘native brutish hordes’. He wanted to know whether
exceptions were to be made for part-Jews (Mischlinge), Jews with
war decorations, or Jews with ‘aryan’ partners. Other protests and
queries, reflecting both unease and lack of clarity over the intended
fate of the Jews from the Reich, reached the Ostministerium and
RSHA. These prompted Himmler to intervene on 30 November to
try to prohibit the liquidation of the train-load of 1,000 German
Jews — many of them elderly, some bearers of the Iron Cross First
Class — sent to Riga. His telephone-call came too late. By then the
Jews had already been slaughtered by Jeckeln’s killing-squads.

The previous day, 29 November, Heydrich had sent out
invitations to several State Secretaries and to selected SS
representatives to a conference to take place close to the Wannsee,
a beautiful lake on the western rim of Berlin, on 9 December.
Heydrich wanted to inculcate relevant government ministries in the
RSHA’s plans to deport to the east all the Jews within Germany’s
grasp throughout Europe. In addition, he was keen to ensure, in line
with the commission he had requested and been granted at the end
of July, that his primacy in orchestrating the deportations was
recognized by all parties involved. On 8 December, the day before

the conference was scheduled to take place, Heydrich had it
postponed to 20 January 1942.

The postponement was caused by the dramatic events unfolding
in the Pacific and in eastern Europe. The Japanese attack on Pearl
Harbor on 7 December would, as Heydrich knew, bring within days
a German declaration of war on the USA. With that, the European
war would become a world war. Meanwhile, the opening of the first
major counter-offensive by the Red Army on 5 December had
blocked for the foreseeable future any prospect of mass
deportations into Soviet territory. Both developments carried
important consequences for the deportation programme. Their
impact soon became evident.

Plans to bring about a ‘final solution’ to the ‘Jewish Question’
were about to enter a new phase — one more murderous than ever.

Hitler’s responsibility for the genocide against the Jews cannot be
questioned. Yet for all his public tirades against the Jews, offering
the strongest incitement to ever more radical onslaughts of extreme
violence, and for all his dark hints that his ‘prophecy’ was being
fulfilled, he was consistently keen to conceal the traces of his
involvement in the murder of the Jews. Sensing that the German
people were not ready to learn the deadly secret, he was
determined — his own general inclination to secrecy was, as always,
a marked one — not to speak of it other than in horrific, but
imprecise, terms. Even in his inner circle Hitler could never bring
himself to speak with outright frankness about the killing of the
Jews.

Even so, compared with the first years of the war when he had
neither in public nor — to go from Goebbels’s diary accounts — in
private made much mention of the Jews, Hitler did now, in the
months when their fate was being determined, refer to them on
numerous occasions. Invariably, whether in public speeches or
during comments in his late-night monologues in his East Prussian

headquarters, his remarks were confined to generalities — but with
menacing allusion to what was happening.

At lunch on 6 October, conversation focused mainly on
eliminating Czech resistance following Heydrich’s appointment on
27 September as Deputy Reich Protector. Hitler spoke of ways ‘to
make the Czechs small’. One way was the deportation of the Jews.
He was speaking about three weeks after he had agreed to their
deportation from the Reich and the Protectorate. His comments
reveal at least one of the reasons why he agreed to deport them: he
continued to believe in the Jews as dangerous ‘fifth-columnists’,
spreading sedition among the population. It was exactly what he
had thought of the role of the Jews in Germany during the First
World War. ‘All Jews must be removed from the Protectorate,’ he
declared around the lunch-table, ‘and not just into the General
Government, but straight away further to the east. This is at present
not practical merely because of the great demand of the military for
means of transport. Along with the Protectorate’s Jews, all the Jews
from Berlin and Vienna should disappear at the same time. The
Jews are everywhere the pipeline through which all enemy news
rushes with the speed of wind into all branches of the population.’

On 21 October, a month after the deportation order, as part of a
diatribe comparing ‘Jewish Christianity’ with ‘Jewish Bolshevism’,
he compared the fall of Rome with latter-day Bolshevization
through the Jews. ‘If we eradicate this plague,’ he concluded, ‘we
will be carrying out a good deed for mankind, of the significance of
which our men out there can have no conception.’ Four days later
his guests were Himmler (a frequent visitor to the Wolf’s Lair
during these weeks) and Heydrich. The conversation again revolved
mainly around the connections of Jewry and Christianity. Hitler
reminded his guests and his regular entourage of his ‘prophecy’.
‘This criminal race has the two million dead of the World War on its
conscience,’ he went on, and ‘now again hundreds of thousands.
Don’t anyone tell me we can’t send them into the marshes! Who
bothers, then, about our people? It’s good when the horror precedes
us that we are exterminating Jewry.’ Though lacking coherence,

these notes of Hitler’s rantings point to his knowledge of the
attempts — eventually given up — in the summer to drown Jewish
women by driving them into the Pripet marshes. Hitler’s allocation
of guilt for the dead of the First World War and the current war to
the Jews, and the recourse once more to his ‘prophecy’, underline
his certainty that the destruction of Jewry was imminent. But the
consequences flowing from the deportation order of the previous
month had still to merge into the full genocidal programme.

On the evening of 5 November, remarks about the ‘racial
inferiority’ of the English lower class led Hitler once more into a
monologue about the Jews. As usual, he linked it to the war. This
was the ‘most idiotic war’ that the British had ever begun, he
ranted, and would lead in defeat to an outbreak of antisemitism in
Britain which would be without parallel. The end of the war, he
proclaimed, would bring ‘the fall of the Jew’. He then unleashed an
extraordinary verbal assault on the lack of ability and creativity of
Jews in every walk of life but one: lying and cheating. The Jew’s
‘entire building will collapse if he is refused a following’, he went
on. ‘I’ve always said the Jews are the most stupid devils that exist.
They don’t have a true musician, thinker, no art, nothing, absolutely
nothing. They are liars, forgers, deceivers. They’ve only got
anywhere through the simple-mindedness of those around them. If
the Jew were not washed by the aryan, he wouldn’t be able to see
out of his eyes for filth. We can live without the Jews. But they
can’t live without us.’

The links, as he saw them, between the Jews and the war that
they had allegedly inspired, now also, after years in which he had
scarcely mentioned the Jews, found a prominent place in his public
speeches. But, whatever the rhetorical flourishes, whatever the
propaganda motive in appealing to the antisemitic instincts of his
hard-core supporters in the party, there cannot be the slightest
doubt, on the basis of his private comments, that Hitler believed in
what he said.

In his speech to the party’s ‘Old Guard’ on 8 November (a date of
especial significance in the Nazi calendar, linking the anniversaries

of the putsch and the allegedly Jewish-inspired Revolution of 1918),
Hitler pressed home the theme of Jewish guilt for the war. Despite
the victories of the previous year, he stated, he had still worried
because of his recognition that behind the war stood ‘the
international Jew’. They had poisoned the peoples through their
control of the press, radio, film, and theatre; they had made sure
that rearmament and war would benefit their business and financial
interests; he had come to know the Jews as the instigators of world
conflagration. England, under Jewish influence, had been the
driving-force of the ‘world-coalition against the German people’. But
it had been inevitable that the Soviet Union, ‘the greatest servant of
Jewry’, would one day confront the Reich. Since then it had become
plain that the Soviet state was dominated by Jewish commissars.
Stalin, too, was no more than ‘an instrument in the hand of this
almighty Jewry’. Behind him stood ‘all those Jews who in
thousandfold ramification lead this powerful empire’. This ‘insight’,
Hitler suggested, had weighed heavily upon him, and compelled
him to face the danger from the east.

Hitler returned to the alleged ‘destructive character’ of the Jews
when talking again to his usual captive audience in the Wolf ’s Lair
in the small hours of 1-2 December. Again, there was a hint, but no
more than that, of what Hitler saw as the natural justice being
meted out to the Jews: ‘he who destroys life, exposes himself to
death. And nothing other than this is happening to them’ — to the
Jews. The gas-vans of Chelmno would start killing the Jews of the
Warthegau in those very days. In Hitler’s warped mentality, such
killing was natural revenge for the destruction caused by the Jews —
above all in the war which he saw as their work. His ‘prophecy’
motif was evidently never far from his mind in these weeks as the
winter crisis was unfolding in the east. It would be at the forefront
of his thoughts in the wake of Pearl Harbor. With his declaration of
war on the USA on 11 December, Germany was now engaged in a
‘world war’ — a term used up to then almost exclusively for the
devastation of 1914-18. In his Reichstag speech of 30 January 1939,
he had ‘prophesied’ that the destruction of the Jews would be the

consequence of a new worldwar. That war, in his view, had now
arrived.

On 12 December, the day after he had announced Germany’s
declaration of war on the USA, Hitler addressed the Reichsleiter and
Gauleiter — an audience of around fifty persons — in his rooms in the
Reich Chancellery. Much of his talk ranged over the consequences
of Pearl Harbor, the war in the east, and the glorious future
awaiting Germany after final victory. He also spoke of the Jews.
And once more he evoked his ‘prophecy’.

‘With regard to the Jewish Question,’ Goebbels recorded,
summarizing Hitler’s comments, ‘the Fuhrer is determined to make
a clear sweep of it. He prophesied that, if they brought about
another world war, they would experience their annihilation. That
was no empty talk. The world war is here. The annihilation of
Jewry must be the necessary consequence. This question is to be
viewed without any sentimentality. We’re not here to have
sympathy with the Jews, but only sympathy with our German
people. If the German people has again now sacrificed around
160,000 dead in the eastern campaign, the originators of this bloody
conflict will have to pay for it with their own lives.’

The tone was more menacing and vengeful than ever. The
original ‘prophecy’ had been a warning. Despite the warning, the
Jews — in Hitler’s view — had unleashed the world war. They would
now pay the price.

Hitler still had his ‘prophecy’ in mind when he spoke privately to
Alfred Rosenberg, Reich Minister for the Eastern Territories, on 14
December, two days after his address to the Gauleiter. Referring to
the text of a forthcoming speech, on which he wanted Hitler’s
advice, Rosenberg remarked that his ‘standpoint was not to speak of
the extermination of Jewry. The Fuhrer approved this stance and
said they had burdened us with the war and brought about the
destruction so it was no wonder if they would be the first to feel the
consequences.’

The party chieftains who had heard Hitler speak on 12 December
in the dramatic context of war now against the USA and unfolding

crisis on the eastern front understood the message. No order or
directive was necessary. They readily grasped that the time of
reckoning had come. On 16 December, Hans Frank reported back to
leading figures in the administration of the General Government.
‘As regards the Jews,’ he began, ‘I’ll tell you quite openly: an end
has to be made one way or another.’ He referred explicitly to
Hitler’s ‘prophecy’ about their destruction in the event of another
world war. He repeated Hitler’s expression in his address to the
Gauleiter that sympathy with the Jews would be wholly misplaced.
The war would prove to be only a partial success should the Jews in
Europe survive it, Frank went on. ‘I will therefore proceed in
principle regarding the Jews that they will disappear. They must
go,’ he declared. He said he was still negotiating about deporting
them to the east. He referred to the rescheduled Wannsee
Conference in January, where the issue of deportation would be
discussed. ‘At any event,’ he commented, ‘a great Jewish migration
will commence.’ ‘But,’ he asked, ‘what is to happen to the Jews? Do
you believe they’ll be accommmodated in village settlements in the
Ostland? They said to us in Berlin: why are you giving us all this
trouble? We can’t do anything with them in the Ostland or in the
Reich Commissariat [Ukraine] either. Liquidate them yourselves! ...
We must destroy the Jews wherever we find them and wherever it
is possible to do so ...’ A programme for bringing this about was
evidently, however, still unknown to Frank. He did not know how it
was to happen. “The Jews are also extraordinarily harmful to us
through their gluttony,’ he continued. ‘We have in the General
Government an estimated 2.5 million — perhaps with those closely
related to Jews and what goes with it, now 3.5 million Jews. We
can’t shoot these 3.5 million Jews, we can’t poison them, but we
must be able to take steps leading somehow to a success in
extermination ...’

The ‘Final Solution’ was still emerging. The ideology of total
annihilation was now taking over from any lingering economic
rationale of working the Jews to death. ‘Economic considerations
should remain fundamentally out of consideration in dealing with

the problem’ was the answer finally given on 18 December to
Lohse’s inquiry about using skilled Jewish workers from the Baltic
in the armaments industry. On the same day, in a private discussion
with Himmler, Hitler confirmed that in the east the partisan war,
which had expanded sharply in the autumn, provided a useful
framework for destroying the Jews. They were ‘to be exterminated
as partisans’, Himmler noted as the outcome of their discussion. The
separate strands of genocide were rapidly being pulled together.

On 20 January 1942, the conference on the ‘final solution’,
postponed from 9 December, eventually took place in a large villa
by the Wannsee. Alongside representatives from the Reich
ministries of the Interior, Justice, and Eastern Territories, the
Foreign Office, from the office of the Four-Year Plan, and from the
General Government, sat Gestapo chief SS-Gruppenfithrer Heinrich
Miller, the commanders of the Security Police in the General
Government and Latvia, Karl Schoengarth and Otto Lange, together
with Adolf Eichmann (the RSHA’s deportation expert, who had the
task of producing a written record of the meeting).

Heydrich opened the meeting by recapitulating that Goring had
given him responsibility — a reference to the mandate of the
previous July — for preparing ‘the final solution of the European
Jewish question’. The meeting aimed to clarify and coordinate
organizational arrangements. (Later in the meeting an inconclusive
attempt was made to define the status of Mischlinge in the
framework of deportation plans.) Heydrich surveyed the course of
anti-Jewish policy, then declared that ‘the evacuation of the Jews to
the east has now emerged, with the prior permission of the Fuhrer,
as a further possible solution instead of emigration’. He spoke of
gathering ‘practical experience’ in the process for ‘the coming final
solution of the Jewish question’, which would embrace as many as
11 million Jews across Europe (stretching, outside German current
territorial control, as far as Britain and Ireland, Switzerland, Spain,
Turkey, and French North African colonies). In the gigantic
deportation programme, the German-occupied territories would be
combed from west to east. The deported Jews would be put to work

in large labour gangs. Many — perhaps most — would die in the
process. The particularly strong and hardy types who survived
would have ‘to be dealt with accordingly’.

Heydrich was not orchestrating an existing and finalized
programme of mass extermination in death-camps. But the Wannsee
Conference was a key stepping-stone on the path to that terrible
genocidal finality. A deportation programme aimed at the
annihilation of the Jews through forced labour and starvation in
occupied Soviet territory following the end of a victorious war had
given way to the realization that the Jews would have to be
systematically destroyed before the war ended — and that the main
locus of their destruction would no longer be the Soviet Union, but
the territory of the General Government.

That the General Government should become the first area to
implement the ‘Final Solution’ was directly requested at the
conference by its representative, State Secretary Josef Buhler. He
wanted the 2% million Jews in his area — most of them incapable of
work, he stressed — ‘removed’ as quickly as possible. The authorities
in the area would do all they could to help expedite the process.
Buhler’s hopes would be fulfilled over the next months. The
regionalized killing in the districts of Lublin and Galicia was
extended by spring to the whole of the General Government, as the
deportation-trains began to ferry their human cargo to the
extermination camps of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. By this
time, a comprehensive programme of systematic annihilation of the
Jews embracing the whole of German-occupied Europe was rapidly
taking shape. By early June a programme had been constructed for
the deportation of Jews from western Europe. The transports from
the west began in July. Most left for the largest of the
extermination camps by this time in operation, Auschwitz-Birkenau
in the annexed territory of Upper Silesia. The ‘Final Solution’ was
under way. The industrialized massmurder would now continue
unabated. By the end of 1942, according to the SS’s own
calculations, 4 million Jews were already dead.

Hitler had not been involved in the Wannsee Conference.
Probably he knew it was taking place; but even this is not certain.
There was no need for his involvement. He had signalled yet again
in unmistakable terms in December 1941 what the fate of the Jews
should be now that Germany was embroiled in another world war.
By then, local and regional killing initiatives had already developed
their own momentum. Heydrich was more than happy to use
Hitler’s blanket authorization of deportations to the east now to
expand the killing operations into an overall programme of
European-wide genocide.

On 30 January 1942, the ninth anniversary of the ‘seizure of
power’, Hitler addressed a packed Sportpalast. As he had been doing
privately over the past weeks, he invoked once more — how often
he repeated the emphasis in these months is striking — his ‘prophecy’
of 30 January 1939. As always, he wrongly dated it to the day of
the outbreak of war with the attack on Poland. ‘We are clear,’ he
declared, ‘that the war can only end either with the extermination
of the aryan peoples or the disappearance of Jewry from Europe.’
He went on: ‘I already stated on 1 September 1939 in the German
Reichstag — and I refrain from overhasty prophecies — that this war
will not come to an end as the Jews imagine, with the
extermination of the European-aryan peoples, but that the result of
this war will be the annihilation of Jewry. For the first time the old
Jewish law will now be applied: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a
tooth ... And the hour will come when the most evil world-enemy
of all time will have played out its role, at least for a thousand
years.’

The message was not lost on his audience. The SD — no doubt
picking up comments made above all by avid Nazi supporters —
reported that his words had been ‘interpreted to mean that the
Fuhrer’s battle against the Jews would be followed through to the
end with merciless consistency, and that very soon the last Jew
would disappear from European soil’.

Vil

When Goebbels spoke to Hitler in March, the death-mills of Belzec
had commenced their grisly operations. As regards the ‘Jewish
Question’, Hitler remained ‘pitiless’, the Propaganda Minister
recorded. ‘The Jews must get out of Europe, if need be through use
of the most brutal means,’ was his view.

A week later, Goebbels left no doubt what ‘the most brutal
means’ implied. ‘From the General Government, beginning with
Lublin, the Jews are now being deported to the east. A fairly
barbaric procedure, not to be described in any greater detail, is
being used here, and not much more remains of the Jews
themselves. In general, it can probably be established that 60 per
cent of them must be liquidated, while only 40 per cent can be put
to work ... A judgement is being carried out on the Jews which is
barbaric, but fully deserved. The prophecy which the Fuhrer gave
them along the way for bringing about a new world war is
beginning to become true in the most terrible fashion. No
sentimentality can be allowed to prevail in these things. If we didn’t
fend them off, the Jews would annihilate us. It’s a life-and-death
struggle between the aryan race and the Jewish bacillus. No other
government and no other regime could produce the strength to
solve this question generally. Here, too, the Fihrer is the
unswerving champion and spokesman of a radical solution ...’

Goebbels himself had played no small part over the years in
pushing for a ‘radical solution’. He had been one of the most
important and high-placed of the party activists pressing Hitler on
numerous occasions to take radical action on the ‘Jewish Question’.
The Security Police had been instrumental in gradually converting
an ideological imperative into an extermination plan. Many others,
at different levels of the regime, had contributed in greater or lesser
measure to the continuing and untrammelled process of
radicalization. Complicity was massive, from the Wehrmacht
leadership and captains of industry down to party hacks,
bureaucratic minions, and ordinary Germans hoping for their own
material advantage through the persecution then deportation of a

helpless, but unloved, minority which had been deemed to be the
implacable enemy of the new ‘people’s community’.

But Goebbels knew what he was talking about in singling out
Hitler’s role. This had often been indirect, rather than overt. It had
consisted of authorizing more than directing. And the hate-filled
tirades, though without equal in their depth of inhumanity,
remained at a level of generalities. Nevertheless, there can be no
doubt about it: Hitler’s role had been decisive and indispensable in
the road to the ‘Final Solution’. Had he not come to power in 1933
and had a national-conservative government, perhaps a military
dictatorship, gained power instead, discriminatory legislation
against Jews would in all probability still have been introduced in
Germany. But without Hitler, and the unique regime he headed, the
creation of a programme to bring about the physical extermination
of the Jews of Europe would have been unthinkable.

22
Last Big Throw of the Dice

Snow still lay on the ground at the Wolf ’s Lair. An icy wind gave
no respite from the cold. But, at the end of February 1942, there
were the first signs that spring was not far away. Hitler could not
wait for the awful winter to pass. He felt he had been let down by
his military leaders, his logistical planners, his transport organizers;
that his army commanders had been faint-hearts, not tough enough
when faced with crisis; that his own strength of will and
determination had alone staved off catastrophe. The winter crisis
had sharpened his sense, never far from the surface, that he had to
struggle not just against external enemies, but against those who
were inadequate, incapable, or even disloyal, in his own ranks. But
the crisis had been surmounted. This in itself was a psychological
blow to the enemy, which had also suffered grievously. It was
necessary now to attack again as soon as possible; to destroy this
mortally weakened enemy in one final great heave. This was how
his thoughts ran. In the insomniac nights in his bunker, he was not
just wanting to erase the memories of the crisis-ridden cold, dark
months. He could hardly wait for the new offensive in the east to
start — the push to the Caucasus, Leningrad, and Moscow, which
would wrestle back the initiative once more. It would be a colossal
gamble. Should it fail, the consequences would be unthinkable.

For those in the Fuhrer Headquarters not preoccupied with
military planning, life was dull and monotonous. Hitler’s secretaries
would go for a daily walk to the next village and back. Otherwise,
they whiled away the hours. Chatting, a film in the evenings, and
the obligatory gathering each afternoon in the Tea House and late

at night again for tea made up the day. ‘Since the tea-party always
consists of the same people, there is no stimulation from outside,
and nobody experiences anything on a personal level,’ Christa
Schroeder wrote to a friend in February 1942, ‘the conversation is
often apathetic and tedious, wearying, and irksome. Talk always
runs along the same lines.’ Hitler’s monologues — outlining his
expansive vision of the world — were reserved for lunch or the
twilight hours. At the afternoon tea-gatherings, politics were never
discussed. Anything connected with the war was taboo. There was
nothing but small-talk. Those present either had no independent
views, or kept them to themselves. Hitler’s presence dominated. But
it seldom now did much to animate. He was invariably tired, but
found it hard to sleep. His insomnia made him reluctant to go to
bed. His entourage often wished he would do so. The tedium for
those around him seemed at times incessant. Occasionally, it was
relieved in the evenings by listening to records — Beethoven
symphonies, selections from Wagner, or Hugo Wolf ’s Lieder. Hitler
would listen with closed eyes. But he alwayswanted the same
records. His entourage knew the numbers off by heart. He would
call out: ‘Aida, last act,’ and someone would shout to one of the
manservants: ‘Number hundred-and-something.’

The war was all that mattered to Hitler. Yet, cocooned in the
strange world of the Wolf ’s Lair, he was increasingly severed from
its realities, both at the front and at home. Detachment ruled out all
vestiges of humanity. Even towards those in his own entourage who
had been with him for many years, there was nothing resembling
real affection, let alone friendship; genuine fondness was reserved
only for his young Alsatian. Human life and suffering were of no
consequence to him. He never visited a field-hospital, nor the
homeless after bomb-raids. He saw no massacres, went near no
concentration camp, viewed no compound of starving prisoners-of-
war. His enemies were in his eyes like vermin to be stamped out.
But his profound contempt for human existence extended to his own
people. Decisions costing the lives of tens of thousands of his
soldiers were made — perhaps it was only thus possible to make

them — without consideration for any human plight. The hundreds
of thousands of dead and maimed were merely an abstraction, the
suffering a necessary and justified sacrifice in the ‘heroic struggle’
for the survival of the people.

Hitler was by now becoming a remote figure for the German
people, a distant warlord. His image had to be refashioned by
Goebbels to match the change which the Russian campaign had
brought about. The premiére of the lavish new film The Great King
in early 1942 allowed Goebbels to stylize Hitler by association as a
latter-day Frederick the Great, isolated in his majesty, conducting a
heroic struggle for his people against mighty enemies and
ultimately overcoming crisis and calamity to emerge triumphant. It
was a portrayal which increasingly matched Hitler’s self-image
during the last years of the war.

But the changed image could do nothing to alter reality: the
German people’s bonds with Hitler were starting to loosen. And as
the war turned inexorably against Germany, Hitler cast around all
the more for scapegoats.

An early complication in 1942 arose with the loss of his
armaments minister, Dr Fritz Todt, in a fatal air-crash on the
morning of 8 February, soon after taking off from the airfield at the
Fuhrer Headquarters.

Todt had masterminded the building of the motorways and the
Westwall for Hitler. In March 1940 he had been given the task, as a
Reich Minister, of coordinating the production of weapons and
munitions. Yet a further major office had come his way in July 1941
with the centralization in his hands of control over energy and
waterways. In the second half of the year, as the first signs of
serious labour shortage in German industry became evident, Todt
was commissioned with organizing the mass deployment within
Germany of Soviet prisoners-of-war and civilian forced labourers.
The accumulation of offices pivotal to the war economy was an
indication of Hitler’s high esteem for Todt. This was reciprocated.
Todt was a convinced National Socialist. But by late 1941, fully
aware of the massive armaments potential of the USA and appalled

at the logistical incompetence of the Wehrmacht’s economic
planning during the eastern campaign, he had become deeply
pessimistic, certain that the war could not be won.

On the morning of 7 February, Todt had flown to Rastenburg to
put to Hitler proposals which had arisen from his meeting a few
days earlier with representatives of the armaments industries. The
meeting that afternoon was plainly anything but harmonious. In
depressed mood, and after a restless night, Todt left next morning
to head for Munich in a twin-engined Heinkel 111. Shortly after
leaving the runway, the plane turned abruptly, headed to land
again, burst into flames, and crashed. The bodies of Todt and four
others on board were yanked with long poles from the burning
wreckage. An official inquiry ruled out sabotage. But suspicion was
never fully allayed. What caused the crash remained a mystery.

Hitler, according to witnesses who saw him at close quarters, was
deeply moved by the loss of Todt, whom, it was said, he still
greatly admired and needed for the war economy. Even if, as was
later often claimed, the breach between him and Todt had become
irreparable on account of the Armaments Minister’s forcefully
expressed conviction that the war could not be won, it is not
altogether obvious why Hitler would have been so desperate as to
resort to having Todt killed in an arranged air-crash at his own
headquarters in circumstances guaranteed to prompt suspicion. Had
he been insistent upon dispensing with Todt’s services, ‘retirement’
on ill-health grounds would have offered a simpler solution. The
only obvious beneficiary from Todt’s demise was the successor
Hitler now appointed with remarkable haste: his highly ambitious
court architect, Albert Speer. But the only ‘evidence’ later used to
hint at any involvement by Speer was his presence in the Fithrer
Headquarters at the time of the crash and his rejection, a few hours
before the planned departure, of an offer of a lift in Todt’s
aeroplane. Whatever the cause of the crash that killed Todt, it
brought Albert Speer, till then in the second rank of Nazi leaders
and known only as Hitler’s court architect and a personal favourite
of the Fuhrer, into the foreground.

Speer’s meteoric rise in the 1930s had rested on shrewd
exploitation of the would-be architect Hitler’s building mania,
coupled with his own driving ambition and undoubted
organizational talent. Hitler liked Speer. ‘He is an artist and has a
spirit akin to mine,’ he said. ‘He is a building-person like me,
intelligent, modest, and not an obstinate military-head.’ Speer later
remarked that he was the nearest Hitler came to having a friend.
Now, Speer was in exactly the right place — close to Hitler - when a
successor to Todt was needed. Six hours after the Reich Minister’s
sudden death, Speer was appointed to replace him in all his offices.
The appointment came as a surprise to many — including, if we are
to take his own version of accounts at face value, Speer himself. But
Speer was certainly anticipating succeeding Todt in construction
work — and possibly more. At any rate, he lost no time in using
Hitler’s authority to establish for himself more extensive powers
than Todt had ever enjoyed. Speer would soon enough have to
battle his way through the jungle of rivalries and intrigues which
constituted the governance of the Third Reich. But once Hitler, the
day after returning to Berlin for Todt’s state funeral on 12 February
(at which he himself delivered the oration as his eyes welled with,
perhaps crocodile, tears), had publicly backed Speer’s supremacy in
armaments production in a speech to leaders of the armaments
industries, the new minister, still not quite thirty-eight years of age,
found that ‘I could do within the widest limits practically what I
wanted’. Building on the changes his predecessor had initiated,
adding his own organizational flair and ruthless drive, and drawing
on his favoured standing with Hitler, Speer proved an inspired
choice. Over the next two years, despite intensified Allied bombing
and the fortunes of war ebbing strongly away from Germany, he
presided over a doubling of armaments output.

Hitler was full of confidence when Goebbels had chance to speak
at length with him during his stay in Berlin following Todt’s funeral.
After the travails of the winter, the Dictator had reason to feel as if
the corner was turned. During the very days that he was in Berlin
the British were suffering two mighty blows to their prestige. Two

German battleships, Gneisenau and Scharnhorst, and the heavy
cruiser Prinz Eugen, had steamed out of Brest and, under the very
noses of the British, passed through the English Channel with
minimal damage, heading for safer moorings at Wilhelmshaven and
Kiel. Hitler could scarcely contain his delight. At the same time, the
news was coming in from the Far East of the imminent fall of
Singapore. Most of all, Hitler was content about the prospects in the
east. The problems of winter had been overcome, and important
lessons learned. “Troops who can cope with such a winter are
unbeatable,’ Goebbels noted. Now the great thaw had set in. “The
Fuhrer is planning a few very hard and crushing offensive thrusts,
which are already in good measure prepared and will doubtless lead
gradually to the smashing of Bolshevism.’

On 15 March, Hitler was back again in Berlin. The serious losses
over the winter made it essential that he attend the midday
ceremony on Heroes’ Memorial Day. In his speech, he portrayed the
previous months as a struggle above all against the elements in a
winter the like of which had not been seen for almost a century and
a half. ‘But one thing we know today,’ he declared. “The Bolshevik
hordes, which were unable to defeat the German soldiers and their
allies this winter, will be beaten by us into annihilation this coming
summer.’

Many people were too concerned about the rumoured reductions
in food rations to pay much attention to the speech. Goebbels was
well aware that food supplies had reached a critical point and that it
would need a ‘work of art’ to put across to the people the reasons
for the reductions. He acknowledged that the cuts would lead to a
‘crisis in the internal mood’. Hitler, in full recognition of the
sensitivity of the situation, had summoned the Propaganda Minister
to his headquarters to discuss the issue before ration-cuts were
announced. Goebbels’s view was that the deterioration in morale at
home demanded tough measures to counter it. He was determined

to take the matter to the Fuhrer, and hoped for the support of
Bormann and the party in getting Hitler to intervene to back more
radical measures. He felt that, as things were, a radical approach to
the law, necessary in total war, was being sabotaged by
representatives of the formal legal system. He approved of
Bormann’s demands for tougher sentences for black-marketeering.
And he took it upon himself to press Hitler to change the leadership
of the Justice Ministry, which since Gtrtner’s death the previous
year had been run by the State Secretary, Franz Schlegelberger. ‘The
bourgeois elements still dominate there,’ he commented, ‘and since
the heavens are high and the Fuhrer far away, it’s extraordinarily
difficult to succeed against these stubborn and listlessly working
authorities.’ It was in this mood — determined to persuade Hitler to
support radical measures, attack privilege, and castigate the state
bureaucracy (above all judges and lawyers) — that Goebbels arrived
at the Wolf ’s Lair on the ice-cold morning of 19 March.

He met a Hitler showing clear signs of the strain he had been
under during the past months, in a state of mind that left him more
than open to Goebbels’s radical suggestions. He needed no
instruction about the mood in Germany, and the impact the
reduction in food rations would have. Lack of transport prevented
food being brought from the Ukraine, he complained. The Transport
Ministry was blamed for the shortage of locomotives. He was
determined to take tough measures. Goebbels then lost no time in
berating the ‘failure’ of the judicial system. Hitler did not demur.
Here, too, he was determined to proceed with ‘the toughest
measures’. Goebbels paraded before Hitler his suggestion for a new
comprehensive law to punish offenders against the ‘principles of
National Socialist leadership of the people’. He wanted the Reich
Ministry of Justice placing in new hands, and pressed for Otto
Thierack, ‘a real National Socialist’, an SA-Gruppenfiihrer, and
currently President of the notorious People’s Court — responsible for
dealing with cases of treason and other serious offences against the
regime — to take the place left by Giirtner. Five months later, Hitler
would make the appointment that Goebbels had wanted, and, in

Thierack’s hands, the capitulation of the judicial system to the
police state would become complete.

For now, Hitler placated Goebbels with a suggestion to prepare
the ground for a radical assault on social privilege by recalling the
Reichstag and having it bestow upon him ‘a special plenipotentiary
power’ so that ‘the evil-doers know that he is covered in every way
by the people’s community’. Given the powers which Hitler already
possessed, the motive was purely populist. An attack on the civil
servants and judges, and upon the privileged in society — or, as
Hitler put it, ‘saboteurs’ and ‘neglecters of duty in public functions’
— could not fail to be popular with the masses. Up to this point,
judges could not be dismissed — not even by the Fithrer. There were
limits, too, to his rights of intervention in the military sphere. The
case of Colonel-General Erich Hoepner still rankled deeply. Hitler
had sacked Hoepner in January and dismissed him from the army in
disgrace for retreating in disobedience to his ‘Halt Order’. Hoepner
had then instituted a law-suit against the Reich over the loss of his
pension rights — and won. With Hitler’s new powers, this could
never happen again. Examples could be set in the military and
civilian sector to serve as deterrents to others and ‘clear the air’.

‘In such a mood,’ wrote Goebbels the next day, ‘my suggestions
for the radicalization of our war-leadership naturally had an
absolutely positive effect on the Fuhrer. I only need to touch a topic
and I have already got my way. Everything that I put forward
individually is accepted piece for piece by the Fuhrer without
contradiction.’

The encouragement of Hitler to back the radicalization of the
home front continued after Goebbels’s return from the Wolf ’s Lair.
Apart from the Propaganda Minister, it came in particular from
Bormann and Himmler. On 26 March, the SD reported on a ‘crisis of
confidence’ resulting from the failure of the state to take a tough
enough stance against black-marketeers and their corrupt customers
among the well-placed and privileged. Himmler, it seems, had
directly prompted the report; Bormann made Hitler aware of it.
Three days later, Goebbels castigated black-marketeering in Das

Reich, publicizing two instances of the death-penalty being imposed
on profiteers.

It was on this same evening, that of 29 March, that Hitler treated
his small audience in the Wolf ’s Lair to a prolonged diatribe on
lawyers and the deficiencies of the legal system, concluding that
‘every jurist must be defective by nature, or would become so in
time’.

This was only a few days after he had personally intervened in a
blind rage with acting Justice Minister Schlegelberger and, when he
proved dilatory, with the more eagerly compliant Roland Freisler
(later the infamous President of the People’s Court as successor to
Thierack but at this time Second State Secretary in the Justice
Ministry), to insist on the death-penalty for a man named Ewald
Schlitt. This was on no more solid basis than the reading of a
sensationalized account in a Berlin evening paper of how an
Oldenburg court had sentenced Schlitt to only five years in a
penitentiary for a horrific physical assault — according to the
newspaper account — that had led to the death of his wife in an
asylum. The court had been lenient because it took the view that
Schlitt had been temporarily deranged. Schlegelberger lacked the
courage to present the case fully to Hitler, and to defend the judges
at the same time. Instead, he promised to improve the severity of
sentencing. Freisler had no compunction in meeting Hitler’s wishes.
The original sentence was overturned. In a new hearing, Schlitt was
duly sentenced to death, and guillotined on 2 April.

Hitler had been so enraged by what he had read on the Schlitt
case — which matched all his prejudices about lawyers and fell
precisely at the time when the judicial system was being made the
scapegoat for the difficulties on the home front — that he had
privately threatened, should other ‘excessively lenient’ sentences be
produced, ‘to send the Justice Ministry to the devil through a
Reichstag law’. As it was, the Schlitt case was brought into service
as a pretext to demand from the Reichstag absolute powers over the
law itself.

Hitler rang Goebbels on 23 April to tell him that he had now
decided to deliver the speech to the Reichstag he had for long had
in mind. Goebbels undertook to make the necessary arrangements
to summon the Reichstag for 3 p.m. on Sunday, 26 April.

In a shortened lunch just before Hitler’s Reichstag speech, a good
deal of the talk revolved around the devastation of Rostock in a
renewed British raid — the heaviest so far. Much of the housing in
the centre of the Baltic harbour-town had been destroyed. But the
Heinkel factory had lost only an estimated 10 per cent of its
productive capacity. German retaliation to British raids had
consisted of attacks on Exeter and Bath. Goebbels favoured the
complete devastation of English ‘cultural centres’. Hitler, furious at
the new attack on Rostock, agreed, according to Goebbels’s account.
Terror had to be answered with terror. English ‘cultural centres’,
seaside resorts, and ‘bourgeois towns’ would be razed to the ground.
The psychological impact of this — and that was the key thing —
would be far greater than that achieved through mostly unsuccessful
attempts to hit armaments factories. German bombing would now
begin in a big way. He had already given out the directive to
prepare a lengthy plan of attack on such lines.

What turned out to be the last ever session of the Great German
Reichstag began punctually. Hitler was nervous at the beginning,
starting hesitantly, then speaking so fast that parts of his speech
were scarcely intelligible. He implied that transport, administration,
and justice had been found lacking. There was a side-swipe (without
naming names) at Colonel-General Hoepner: ‘no one can stand on
their well-earned rights’, but had to know ‘that today there are only
duties’. He requested from the Reichstag, therefore, the legal
authorization ‘to hold each one to fulfilment of his duties’ and to
dismiss from office without respect to ‘acquired rights’. Using the
Schlitt case as his example, he launched into a savage attack on the
failings of the judiciary. From now on, he said, he would intervene
in such cases and dismiss judges ‘who visibly fail to recognize the
demands of the hour’.

As soon as Hitler had finished speaking, Goring read out the
‘Resolution’ of the Reichstag, empowering Hitler ‘without being
bound to existing legal precepts’, in his capacity as ‘Leader of the
Nation, Supreme Commander of the Wehrmacht, Head of
Government and supreme occupant of executive power, as supreme
law-lord and as Leader of the Party’, to remove from office and
punish anyone, of whatever status, failing to carry out his duty,
without respect to pensionable rights, and without any stipulated
formal proceedings.

Naturally, the ‘Resolution’ was unanimously approved. The last
shreds of constitutionality had been torn apart. Hitler now was the
law.

Many people were surprised that Hitler needed any extension of
his powers. They wondered what had gone on that had prompted
his scathing attacks on the internal administration. Disappointment
was soon registered that no immediate actions appeared to follow
his strong words. Lawyers, judges, and civil servants were not
unnaturally dismayed by the assault on their professions and
standing. What had caused it was in their eyes a mystery. The
Fuhrer had evidently, they thought, been crassly misinformed. The
consequences were, however, unmistakable. As the head of the
judiciary in Dresden pointed out, with the ending of all judicial
autonomy Germany had now become a ‘true Fuhrer state’.

Hitler’s populist instincts had not deserted him. Less elevated
sections of the population enthused over his assault on rank and
privilege. This had successfully allowed him to divert attention from
more fundamental questions about the failures of the previous
winter and to provide a much-needed morale-booster through easy
attacks on cheap targets.

For the mass of the German people, however, only the prospect
of the peace that final victory would bring could sustain morale for
any length of time. Many ‘despondent souls’, ran one party report
on the popular mood, were ‘struck only by one part of the Ftihrer’s
speech: where he spoke of the preparations for the winter campaign
of 1942-3. The more the homeland has become aware of the cruelty

and hardship of the winter struggle in the east, the more the
longing for an end to it has increased. But now the end is still not in
sight.’

Ill

Hours after his Reichstag speech, Hitler left for Munich, en route to
the Berghof and a meeting with Mussolini. He was in expansive
mood next lunchtime at his favourite Munich restaurant, the
Osteria. He held forth to Hermann Giesler, one of his favoured
architects, and his companion-in-arms from the old days of the
party’s early struggles in Munich Hermann Esser, on his plans for
double-decker express trains to run at 200 kilometres an hour on
four-metre-wide tracks between Upper Silesia and the Donets Basin.
Two days later, at a snow-covered Berghof with Eva Braun acting as
hostess, he was regaling his supper guests with complaints about the
lack of top Wagnerian tenors in Germany, and the deficiencies of
leading conductors Bruno Walter and Hans Knappertsbusch. Walter,
a Jew who had become renowned as the director of the Bavarian
State Opera and Leipziger Gewandhaus before being forced out by
the Nazis in 1933 and emigrating to America, was an ‘absolute
nonentity’, claimed Hitler, who had ruined the orchestra of the
Vienna State Opera to the extent that it was capable only of playing
‘beer music’. Although Walter’s arch-rival Knappertsbusch, tall,
blond, blue-eyed, had the appearance of a model ‘aryan’ male,
listening to him conduct an opera was ‘a punishment’ to Hitler’s
mind, as the orchestra drowned out the singing and the conductor
performed such gyrations that it was painful to look at him. Only
Wilhelm Furtwangler, who had turned the Berlin Philharmonic into
such a magnificent orchestra, one of the regime’s most important
cultural ambassadors, and acknowledged maestro in conducting the
Fuhrer’s own favourite Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, and Wagner,
met with his unqualified approval.

Between monologues, he had had ‘discussions’ with Mussolini in
the baroque Klessheim Castle, once a residence of the Prince

Bishops of Salzburg, now luxuriously refurbished with furniture and
carpets removed from France to make a Nazi guest-house and
conference-centre. The atmosphere was cordial. Hitler looked tired
to Ciano, and bearing the signs of the strains of the winter. His hair,
Ciano noticed, was turning grey. Hitler’s primary aim was to
convey optimism to Mussolini about the war in the east.
Ribbentrop’s message to Ciano, in their separate meeting, was no
different: the ‘genius of the Ftthrer’ had mastered the evils of the
Russian winter; a coming offensive towards the Caucasus would
deprive Russia of fuel, bring the conflict to an end, and force Britain
to terms; British hopes from America amounted to ‘a colossal bluff’.

The talks continued the next day, now with military leaders
present, at the Berghof. How much of a genuine discussion there
was is plain from Ciano’s description: ‘Hitler talks, talks, talks,
talks’, non-stop for an hour and forty minutes. Mussolini, used
himself to dominating all conversation, had to suffer in silence,
occasionally casting a surreptitious glance at his watch. Ciano
switched off and thought of other things. Keitel yawned and
struggled to keep awake. Jodl did not manage it: ‘after an epic
struggle’, he finally fell asleep on a sofa. Mussolini, overawed as
always by Hitler, was, apparently, satisfied with the meetings.

A week later, on 8 May, the Wehrmacht began its planned spring
offensive. The first targets for Manstein’s 11th Army, as laid down
in Hitler’s directive of 5 April, were the Kerch peninsula and
Sevastopol in the Crimea. The directive stipulated the drive on the
Caucasus, to capture the oil-fields and occupy the mountain-passes
that opened the route to the Persian Gulf, as the main goal of the
summer offensive to follow, code-named ‘Blue’. The removal of the
basis of the Soviet war-economy and the destruction of remaining
military forces thought catastrophically weakened over the winter
would, it was presumed, bring victory in the east. There, Hitler had
reasserted in planning the summer operations, the war would be
decided. The key factor was no longer ‘living space’, but oil. ‘If I
don’t get the oil of Maykop and Grozny,’ Hitler admitted, ‘then I
must finish this war.’

The Wehrmacht and Army High Commands did not contradict the
strategic priority. In any case, they had no better alternative to
recommend. And the lack of a coordinated command structure
meant, as before, competition for Hitler’s approval — a military
version of ‘working towards the Fuhrer’. It was not a matter of
Hitler imposing a diktat on his military leaders. Despite his full
recognition of the gravity of the German losses over the winter,
Halder entirely backed the decision for an all-out offensive to
destroy the basis of the Soviet economy. The April directive for
‘Blue’ bore his clear imprint. And despite the magnitude of their
miscalculation the previous year, operational planners, fed by
highly flawed intelligence, far from working on the basis of a
‘worst-case scenario’, backed the optimism about the military and
economic weakness of the Soviet Union.

Whatever the presumptions of Soviet losses - on which German
intelligence remained woefully weak — the Wehrmacht’s own
strength, as Halder knew only too well, had been drastically
weakened. Over a million of the 3.2 million men who had attacked
the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 were by now dead, captured, or
missing. At the end of March, only 5 per cent of army divisions
were fully operational. The figures that Halder gave Hitler on 21
April were chilling in the extreme. Some 900,000 men had been lost
since the autumn, only 50 per cent replaced (including the call-up of
all available twenty-year-olds, and serious inroads into the labour-
force at home). Only around 10 per cent of the vehicles lost had
been replaced. Losses of weapons were also massive. At the
beginning of the spring offensive, the eastern front was short of
around 625,000 men. Given such massive shortages, everything was
poured into bolstering the southern offensive in the Soviet Union.
Of the sixty-eight divisions established on this part of the front,
forty-eight had been entirely, and seventeen at least partly,
reconstituted.

Poor Soviet intelligence meant the Red Army was again
unprepared for the German assault when it came. By 19 May, the
Kerch offensive was largely over, with the capture of 150,000

prisoners and a great deal of booty. A heavy Soviet counter on
Kharkhov had been, if with difficulty, successfully fended off. By the
end of May, the battle at Kharkhov had also resulted in a notable
victory, with three Soviet armies destroyed, and over 200,000 men
and a huge quantity of booty captured. This was in no small
measure owing to Hitler’s refusal, fully endorsed by Halder, to
allow Field-Marshal Bock, since mid-January Commander of Army
Group South, to break off the planned offensive and take up a
defensive position.

Hitler had reason to feel pleased with himself when he spoke for
two hours behind closed doors in the Reich Chancellery to the
Reichsleiter and Gauleiter on the afternoon of 23 May. He had come
to Berlin for the funeral of Carl Rover, Gauleiter of Weser-Ems,
which had taken place the previous day. After a difficult period, also
on the home front, he evidently could not miss the opportunity to
bolster the solidarity and loyalty of his long-standing party
stalwarts, a vital part of his power-base. And in such company, he
was prepared to speak with some candour about his aims.

Hitler emphasized that the war in the east was not comparable
with any war in the past. It was not a simple matter of victory or
defeat, but of ‘triumph or destruction’. He was aware of the
enormous capacity of the American armaments programme. But the
scale of output claimed by Roosevelt ‘could in no way be right’. And
he had good information on the scale of Japanese naval
construction. He reckoned on serious losses for the American navy
when it clashed with the Japanese fleet. He took the view ‘that in
the past winter we have won the war’. Preparations were now in
place to launch the offensive in the south of the Soviet Union to cut
off the enemy’s oil-supplies. He was determined to finish off the
Soviets in the coming summer.

He looked to the future. The Reich would massively extend its
land in the east, gaining coal, grain, oil, and above all national
security. In the west, too, the Reich would have to be strengthened.
The French would ‘have to bleed for that’. But there it was a
strategic, not an ethnic, question. ‘We must solve the ethnic

questions in the east.’ Once the territory needed for the
consolidation of Europe was in German hands, it was his intention
to build a gigantic fortification, like the limes of Roman times, to
separate Asia from Europe. He went on with his vision of a
countryside settled by farmer-soldiers, building up a population of
250 millions within seventy or eighty years. Then Germany would
be safe against all future threats. It should not be difficult, he
claimed, to preserve the ethnic-German character of the conquered
territories. ‘That would also be the actual meaning of this war. For
the serious sacrifice of blood could only be justified through later
generations gaining from it the blessing of waving cornfields.’ Nice
though it would be to acquire a few colonies to provide rubber or
coffee, ‘our colonial territory is in the east. There are to be found
fertile black earth and iron, the bases of our future wealth.’ He
ended his vision of the future with the vaguest notion of what he
understood as a social revolution. The National Socialist Movement,
he said, had to make sure that the war did not end in a capitalist
victory, but in a victory of the people. A new society would have to
be constructed out of the victory, one resting not on money, status,
or name, but on courage and test of character. He was confident
that victory would be Germany’s. Once the ‘business in the east’ was
finished — in the summer, it was to be hoped -— ‘the war is practically
won for us. Then we will be in the position of conducting a large-
scale pirate-war against the Anglo-Saxon powers, which in the long
run they will not be able to withstand.’

Hitler was in ebullient mood when Goebbels saw him at
lunchtime in the Reich Chancellery on 29 May. With the advance to
the Caucasus, he told his Propaganda Minister, ‘we’ll be pressing the
Soviet system so to say on its Adam’s Apple’. He thought the new
Soviet losses at Kerch and Kharkhov were not reparable; Stalin was
reaching the end of his resources; there were major difficulties with
food-supplies in the Soviet Union; morale there was poor. He had
concrete plans for the extension of the Reich borders also in the
west. He took it as a matter of course that Belgium, with its ancient
Germanic provinces of Flanders and Brabant, would be split into

German Reichsgaue. So would, whatever the views of Dutch
National Socialist leader Anton Mussert, the Netherlands.

Two days earlier, one of Hitler’s most important henchmen,
Reinhard Heydrich, Chief of the Security Police and since the
previous autumn Deputy Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, had
been fatally wounded in an assassination attempt carried out by
patriotic Czech exiles who had been flown from London - with the
aid of the British subversive warfare agency, the Special Operations
Executive (SOE) — and parachuted into the vicinity of Prague. Hitler
always favoured brutal reprisals. There could be no doubt that the
attack on one of the key representatives of his power would
provoke a ferocious response. Over 1,300 Czechs, some 200 of them
women, were eventually rounded up by the SS and executed. On 10
June the entire village of Lidice - the name had been found on a
Czech SOE agent arrested earlier — would be destroyed, the male
inhabitants shot, the women taken to Ravensbrtick concentration
camp, the children removed.

Hitler’s mood was ripe for Goebbels to bring up once more the
question of the deportation of Berlin’s remaining Jews. The
involvement of a number of young Jews (associated with a
Communist-linked resistance group led by Herbert Baum) in the
arson attempt at the anti-Bolshevik exhibition ‘The Soviet Paradise’
in Berlin’s Lustgarten on 18 May enabled the Propaganda Minister
to emphasize the security dangers if the 40,000 or so Jews he
reckoned were still in the Reich capital were not deported. He had
been doing his best, he had noted a day earlier, to have as many
Jews as possible from his domain ‘shipped off to the east’. Goebbels
now pleaded for ‘a more radical Jewish policy’ and, he said, ‘I push
at an open door with the Fuhrer,’ who told Speer to find
replacements for the Jews in the armaments industry with ‘foreign
workers’ as soon as possible.

Talk moved to the dangers of possible internal revolt in the event
of a critical situation in the war. If the danger became acute, Hitler
stated, the prisons ‘would be emptied through liquidations’ to
prevent the possibility of the gates being opened to let the

‘revolting mob’ loose on the people. But in contrast to 1917 there
was nothing to fear from the German workers, remarked Hitler. All
German workers desired victory. They had most to lose by defeat
and would not contemplate stabbing him in the back. ‘The Germans
take part in subversive movements only when the Jews lure them
into it,’ Goebbels had Hitler saying. ‘Therefore one must liquidate
the Jewish danger, cost what it takes.’ West-European civilization
only provided a facade of assimilation. Back in the ghetto, Jews
soon returned to type. But there were elements among them who
operated ‘with dangerous brutality and thirst for revenge’.
‘Therefore,’ recorded Goebbels, ‘the Fiihrer does not wish at all that
the Jews be evacuated to Siberia. There, under the hardest living
conditions, they would doubtless again represent a vigorous
element. He would most like to see them resettled in Central Africa.
There they would live in a climate that would certainly not make
them strong and capable of resistance. At any rate, it is the aim of
the Fithrer to make Western Europe entirely free of Jews. Here they
can no longer have any home.’

Did such remarks mean that Hitler was unaware that the ‘Final
Solution’ was under way, that Jews had already been slaughtered in
their thousands in Russia and were now being murdered by poison
gas in industrialized mass-killing centres already operating in
Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, and Auschwitz-Birkenau (with Treblinka
and Maidanek soon to follow)? That seems inconceivable.

On 9 April 1942, a time when the deportations from western
European countries to the gas-chambers of Poland were also getting
under way, Hans Frank told his underlings in the General
Government that orders for the liquidation of the Jews came ‘from
higher authority’. Himmler himself was to claim explicitly in an
internal, top-secret, letter to SS-Obergruppenftihrer Gottlob Berger,
Chief of the SS Main Office, on 28 July 1942, that he was operating
explicitly under Hitler’s authority: ‘The occupied Eastern territories
are being made free of Jews. The Fuhrer has placed the
implementation of this very difficult order on my shoulders.’

How much detail Hitler asked for, or was given, cannot be
known. According to the post-war testimony of his valet, Heinz
Linge, and his personal adjutant, Otto Giinsche, extracted by their
Soviet captors, Hitler showed a direct interest in the development of
gas-chambers and spoke to Himmler about the use of gas-vans. One
indication, at the very least, that he was aware of the slaughter of
huge numbers of Jews is provided by a report which Himmler had
had drawn up for him at the end of 1942 providing statistics on
Jews ‘executed’ in southern Russia on account of alleged connection
with ‘bandit’ activity. Having ordered in mid-December that
partisan ‘bands’ were to be combated ‘by the most brutal means’,
also to be used against women and children, Hitler was presented
by Himmler with statistics for southern Russia and the Ukraine on
the number of ‘bandits’ liquidated in the three months of
September, October, and November 1942. The figures for those
helping the ‘bands’ or under suspicion of being connected with them
listed 363,211 ‘Jews executed’. The connection with subversive
activity was an obvious sham. Others in the same category
‘executed’ totalled ‘only’ 14,257.

Four months after this, in April 1943, Himmler would have an
abbreviated statistical report on ‘the Final Solution of the Jewish
Question’ sent to Hitler. Aware of the taboo in Hitler’s entourge on
explicit reference to the mass killing of the Jews, Himmler had the
statistical report presented in camouflage-language. The fiction had
to be maintained. Himmler ordered the term ‘Special Treatment’
(itself a euphemism for killing) deleted from the shortened version
to be sent to Hitler. His statistician, Dr Richard Korherr, was
ordered simply to refer to the ‘transport of Jews’. There was
reference to Jews being ‘sluiced through’ unnamed camps. The
camouflage-language was there to serve a specific purpose. Hitler
would understand what it meant, and recognize the Reichsftihrer-
SS’s ‘achievement’.

When he spoke at lunchtime on 29 May 1942 to Goebbels and to
his other guests at his meal-table about his preference for the
‘evacuation’ of the Jews to Central Africa, Hitler was sustaining the

fiction which had to be upheld even in his ‘court circle’ that the
Jews were being resettled and put to work in the east. Goebbels
himself, in his diary entry, went along with the fiction, though he
knew only too well what was happening to the Jews in Poland.
Hitler had by now internalized his authorization of the killing of the
Jews. It was typical of his way of dealing with the ‘Final Solution’
that he spoke of it either by repeating what he knew had long since
ceased to be the case; or by alluding to the removal of Jews from
Europe (often in the context of his ‘prophecy’) at some distant point
in the future.

Why was Hitler so anxious to maintain the fiction of
resettlement, and uphold the ‘terrible secret’ even among his inner
circle? A partial explanation is doubtless to be found in Hitler’s
acute personal inclination to extreme secrecy which he translated
into a general mode of rule, as laid down in his ‘Basic Order’ of
January 1940, that information should only be available on a ‘need-
to-know’ basis. Knowledge of extermination could provide a
propaganda gift to enemies, and perhaps stir up unrest and internal
difficulties in the occupied territories, particularly in western
Europe. Not least, as regards public opinion in the Reich itself, the
Nazi leadership believed that the German people were not ready for
the gross inhumanity of the extermination of the Jews. Hitler had
agreed with Rosenberg in mid-December 1941, directly following
the declaration of war on the USA, that it would be inappropriate to
speak of extermination in public. Late in 1942, Bormann was keen
to quell rumours circulating about the ‘Final Solution’ in the east.
Himmler would later, speaking to SS leaders, refer to it as ‘a never
to be written glorious page of our history’. Evidently, it was a
secret to be carried to the grave.

In his public statements referring to his 1939 ‘prophecy’, Hitler
could now lay claim to his place in ‘the glorious page of our history’
while still detaching himself from the sordid and horrific realities of
mass killing. Beyond that, a further incentive to secrecy was that
Hitler wanted no bureaucratic and legal interference. He had
experienced this in the ‘euthanasia action’, necessitating his unique

written authorization, and the problems which subsequently arose
from it. His tirades about the judicial system and bureaucracy in the
spring of 1942 were a further indicator of his sensitivity towards
such interference. To avoid any legalistic meddling, Himmler
explicitly refused in the summer of 1942 to entertain attempts to
define ‘a Jew’.

Manstein’s difficulties in taking Sevastopol held up the start of
‘Operation Blue’ — the push to the Caucasus — until the end of June.
But at this point, Hitler needed have no doubts that the war was
going well. In the Atlantic, the U-boats had met with unprecedented
success. In the first six months of 1942, they had sunk almost a third
more shipping tonnage than during the whole of 1941, and far
fewer U-boats had been lost in the process. And on the evening of
21 June came the stunning news that Rommel had taken Tobruk.
Through brilliant tactical manoeuvring during the previous three
weeks, Rommel had outwitted the ineffectively led and poorly
equipped British 8th Army and was then able to inflict a serious
defeat on the Allied cause by seizing the stronghold of Tobruk, on
the Libyan coast, capturing 33,000 British and Allied soldiers (many
of them South African) and a huge amount of booty. It was a
spectacular German victory and a disaster for the British. The
doorway to German dominance of Egypt was wide open. All at once
there was a glimmering prospect in view of an enormous pincer of
Rommel’s troops pushing eastwards through Egypt and the Caucasus
army sweeping down through the Middle East linking forces to
wipe out the British presence in this crucial region. Hitler,
overjoyed, immediately promoted Rommel to Field-Marshal. Italian
hopes of German support for an invasion of Malta were now finally
shelved until later in the year. Hitler backed instead Rommel’s plans
to advance to the Nile. Within days, German troops were in striking
distance of Alexandria.

One dark cloud on an otherwise sunny horizon was, however, the
damage being caused to towns in western Germany by British
bombing raids. On 30 May, Hitler had said that he did not think
much of the RAF’s threats of heavy air-raids. Precautions, he
claimed, had been taken. The Luftwaffe had so many squadrons
stationed in the west that destruction from the air would be doubly
repaid. That very night, the city centre of Cologne was devastated
by the first 1,000-bomber raid. Hitler was enraged at the failure of
the Luftwaffe to defend the Reich, blaming Goring personally for
neglecting the construction of sufficient flak installations.

Despite the bombing of Cologne, the military situation put Hitler
and his entourage in excellent mood in early June. On the first day
of the month Hitler flew to Army Group South’s headquarters at
Poltava to discuss with Field-Marshal Bock the timing and tactics of
the coming offensive. Apart from Manstein, all the commanders
were present, as Hitler agreed to Bock’s proposal to delay the start
of ‘Operation Blue’ for some days in order to take full advantage of
the victory at Kharkhov to destroy Soviet forces in adjacent areas.
Hitler informed the commanders that the outcome of ‘Blue’ would
be decisive for the war.

On 4 June, Hitler paid a surprise visit — it had been arranged only
the previous day — to Finland. Officially, the visit was to mark the
seventy-fifth birthday of the Finnish military hero, Marshal Baron
Carl Gustaf von Mannerheim, supreme commander of the Finnish
armed forces. The aim was to bolster Finnish solidarity with
Germany through underlining for Mannerheim — a veteran of
struggles with the Red Army — the immensity of the threat of
Bolshevism. The Finns would at the same time be warned about any
possible considerations of leaving German ‘protection’ and putting
out feelers to the Soviet Union. In addition, the visit would head off
any possible ties of Finland with the western Allies.

The meeting had no concrete results. That was not its aim. For
now, Hitler had reassured himself that he had the Finns’ continued
support. He was well satisfied with the visit. For their part, the
Finns maintained their superficially good relations with Germany,

while keeping a watchful eye on events. The course of the war over
the next six months conveyed its own clear message to them to
begin looking for alternative loyalties.

While Hitler was en route to Finland, news came through from
Prague that Reinhard Heydrich had died of the wounds he had
suffered in the attack on 27 May. Back in his headquarters, Hitler
put it down to ‘stupidity or pure dimwittedness’ that ‘such an
irreplaceable man as Heydrich should expose himself to the danger’
of assassins, by driving without adequate bodyguard in an open-top
car, and insisted that Nazi leaders comply with proper security
precautions. Hitler was in reflective mood at the state funeral in
Berlin on 9 June. So soon after the loss of Todt, it seemed to him —
and, in fact, was not far from the truth — as if the party and state
leadership only assembled for state funerals. He spent time in the
evening reminiscing with Goebbels about the early days of the
party. ‘The Fuhrer is very happy in these memories,’ remarked
Goebbels. ‘He lives from the past, which seems to him like a lost
paradise.’

‘Operation Blue’, the great summer offensive in the south, began on
28 June. The offensive, carried out by five armies in two groups
against the weakest part of the Soviet front, between Kursk in the
north and Taganrog on the Sea of Azov in the south, was able — as
Barbarossa had done the previous year — to use the element of
surprise to make impressive early gains. Meanwhile, on 1 July,
finally, the fall of Sevastopol brought immediate promotion to
Field-Marshal for Manstein.

After the initial break through the Russian lines, the rapid
advance on Voronezh ended in the capture of the city on 6 July.
This brought, however, the first confrontation of the new campaign
between Hitler and his generals. Voronezh itself was an
unimportant target. But a Soviet counter-attack had tied down two
armoured divisions in the city for two days. This slowed the south-

eastern advance along the Don and allowed enemy forces to escape.
Hitler was enraged that Bock had ignored his instructions that the
advance of the panzer divisions was to proceed without any hold-
ups to the Volga in order to allow maximum destruction of the
Soviet forces. In fact, when he had flown to Bock’s headquarters at
Poltava on 3 July, Hitler had been far less dogmatic and clear in
face-to-face discussion with the field-marshal than he was in the
map-room of the Wolf ’s Lair. But that did not save Bock. Hitler said
he was not going to have his plans spoiled by field-marshals as they
had been in autumn 1941. Bock was dismissed and replaced by
Colonel-General Freiherr Maximilian von Weichs.

To be closer to the southern front, Hitler moved his headquarters
on 16 July to a new location, given the name ‘Werwolf ’, near
Vinnitsa in the Ukraine. Sixteen planes, their engines already
whirring, waited on the runway at the Wolf ’s Lair that day for
Hitler and his entourage to take them on a three-hour flight to their
new surrounds. After a car-ride along rutted roads, they finally
arrived at the damp, mosquito-infested huts that were to be their
homes for the next three and a half months. Even the Wolf ’s Lair
began to seem idyllic. Halder was pleased enough with the layout of
the new headquarters. Hitler’s secretaries were less happy with
their cramped quarters. As at Rastenburg, they had little to do and
were bored. For Hitler, the daily routine was unchanged from that
in the Wolf ’s Lair. At meals — his own often consisted of no more
than a plate of vegetables with apples to follow — he could still
appear open, relaxed, engaged. As always, he monopolized dinner-
table topics of conversation on a wide variety of topics that touched
on his interests or obsessions. These included the evils of smoking,
the construction of a motorway-system throughout the eastern
territories, the deficiencies of the legal system, the achievements of
Stalin as a latter-day Ghengis Khan, keeping the standard of living
low among the subjugated peoples, the need to remove the last
Jews from German cities, and the promotion of private initiative
rather than a state-controlled economy.

Away from the supper soliloquies, however, tension mounted
once more between Hitler and his military leaders. The military
advance continued to make ground. But the numbers of Soviet
prisoners captured steadily diminished. This was endlessly discussed
at FHQ. Hitler’s military advisers were worried. They took it that
the Soviets were pulling back their forces in preparation for a big
counter-offensive, probably on the Volga, in the Stalingrad region.
Halder had warned as early as 12 July of concern at the front that
the enemy, recognizing German envelopment tactics, was avoiding
direct fight and withdrawing to the south. Hitler’s view was,
however, that the Red Army was close to the end of its tether. He
pressed all the more for a speedy advance.

His impulsive, though sometimes unclear or ambiguous,
command-style caused constant difficulties for the operational
planners. But the essential problem was more far-reaching. Hitler
felt compelled by two imperatives: time, and material resources.
The offensive had to be completed before the might of Allied
resources came fully into play. And possession of the Caucasian oil-
fields would, in his view, both be decisive in bringing the war in the
east to a successful conclusion, and provide the necessary platform
to continue a lengthy war against the Anglo-Saxon powers. If this
oil were not gained, Hitler had said, the war would be lost for
Germany within three months. Following his own logic, he had,
therefore, no choice but to stake everything on the ambitious strike
to the Caucasus in a victorious summer offensive. Even if some
sceptical voices could be heard, Halder and the professionals in
Army High Command had favoured the offensive. But the gap,
already opened up the previous summer, between them and the
Dictator was rapidly widening. What Hitler saw as the negativity,
pessimism, and timidity of Army High Command’s traditional
approaches drove him into paroxysms of rage. Army planners for
their part had cold feet about what increasingly seemed to them a
reckless gamble carried out by dilettante methods, more and more
likely to end in disaster. But they could not now pull out of the

strategy which they had been party to implementing. The German
war-effort had set in train its own self-destructive dynamic.

The risk of military disaster was seriously magnified by Hitler’s
Directive No.45 of 23 July 1942. Thereafter, a calamity was waiting
to happen. Unlike the April directive, in which Halder’s hand had
been visible, this directive rested squarely on a decision by Hitler,
which the General Staff had sought to prevent. The directive for the
continuation of ‘Blue’, now renamed ‘Operation Braunschweig’,
began with a worryingly unrealistic claim: ‘In a campaign of little
more than three weeks, the broad goals set for the southern flank of
the eastern front have been essentially achieved. Only weak enemy
forces of the Timoshenko armies have succeeded in escaping
envelopment and reaching the southern bank of the Don. We have
to reckon with their reinforcement from the Caucasus area.’

Earlier in the month, Hitler had divided Army Group South into a
northern sector (Army Group B, originally under Field-Marshal von
Bock, then, after his sacking, under Colonel-General Freiherr von
Weichs) and a southern sector (Army Group A, under Field-Marshal
Wilhelm List). The original intention, under his Directive No.41 of 5
April, had been to advance on the Caucasus following the
encirclement and destruction of Soviet forces in the vicinity of
Stalingrad. This was now altered to allow attacks on the Caucasus
and Stalingrad (including the taking of the city itself) to proceed
simultaneously. List’s stronger Army Group A was left to destroy
enemy forces in the Rostov area, then conquer the whole of the
Caucasus region alone. This was to include the eastern coast of the
Black Sea, crossing the Kuban and occupying the heights around the
oil-fields of Maykop, controlling the almost impenetrable Caucasian
mountain passes, and driving south-eastwards to take the oil-rich
region around Grozny, then Baku, far to the south on the Caspian
Sea. The attack on Stalingrad was left to the weaker Army Group B,
which was expected thereafter to press on along the lower Volga to
Astrakhan on the Caspian. The strategy was sheer lunacy.

Only the most incautiously optimistic assessment of the weakness
of the Soviet forces could have justified the scale of the risk

involved. But Hitler took precisely such a view of enemy strength.
Moreover, he was as always temperamentally predisposed to a risk-
all strategy, with alternatives dismissed out of hand and boats
burned to leave no fall-back position. As always, his self-
justification could be bolstered by the dogmatic view that there was
no alternative. Halder, aware of more realistic appraisals of Soviet
strength, and the build-up of forces in the Stalingrad area, but
unable to exert any influence upon Hitler, was by now both
seriously concerned and frustrated at his own impotence. On 23
July, the day that Hitler issued his Directive No.45, Halder had
written in his diary: ‘This chronic tendency to underrate enemy
capabilities is gradually assuming grotesque proportions and
develops into a positive danger. The situation is getting more and
more intolerable. There is no room for any serious work. This so-
called leadership is characterized by a pathological reacting to the
impressions of the moment and a total lack of any understanding of
the command machinery and its possibilities.’ On 15 August,
Halder’s notes for his situation report began: ‘Overall picture: have
we extended the risk too far?’ The question was well warranted. But
the insight had come rather late in the day.

By mid-August, Army Group A had swept some 350 miles to the
south, over the north Caucasian plain. It was now far separated
from Army Group B, with a lengthy exposed flank, and formidable
logistical problems of ensuring supplies. Its advance slowed
markedly in the wooded foothills of the northern Caucasus. Maykop
was taken, but the oil-refineries were found in ruins, systematically
and expertly destroyed by the retreating Soviet forces. The impetus
had been lost. Hitler showed little sense of realism when he spoke
privately to Goebbels on 19 August. Operations in the Caucasus, he
said, were going extremely well. He wanted to take possession of
the oil-wells of Maykop, Grozny, and Baku during the summer,
securing Germany’s oil supplies and destroying those of the Soviet
Union. Once the Soviet border had been reached, the breakthrough
into the Near East would follow, occupying Asia Minor and
overrunning Iraq, Iran, and Palestine, to cut off Britain’s oil

supplies. Within two or three days, he wanted to commence the big
assault on Stalingrad. He intended to destroy the city completely,
leaving no stone on top of another. It was both psychologically and
militarily necessary. The forces deployed were reckoned to be
sufficient to capture the city within eight days.

The last significant successes of Army Group B, meanwhile, had
been in encircling and destroying two Russian armies south-west of
Kalac, on the Don due west of Stalingrad, on 8 August. Advancing in
punishing heat and hindered through chronic fuel shortage, on 23
August, the 6th Army, under General Friedrich Paulus, succeeded in
reaching the Volga, north of Stalingrad. Amid heavy Soviet
defences, the advance ground rapidly to a halt. The summer
offensive had, as it turned out, run its course in less than two
months. As early as 26 August Halder was noting: ‘Near Stalingrad,
serious tension on account of superior counter-attacks of the enemy.
Our divisions are no longer very strong. The command is heavily
under nervous strain.’ The 6th Army was, however, able to
consolidate its position. Over the next weeks, it even gained the
advantage. But the nightmare of Stalingrad was only just beginning.

While the southern part of the massively extended front was
running out of steam, with the 6th Army now bogged down at
Stalingrad and List’s Army Group A stalled in the Caucasus, Kluge’s
Army Group Centre had encountered a damaging setback, suffering
horrendous casualties in an ill-fated attempt ordered by Hitler to
wipe out Russian forces at Sukhinichi, 150 miles west of Moscow,
from where it was hoped to establish the basis for a renewed drive
on the capital. Kluge, on a visit to ‘Werwolf’ on 7 August, had asked
Hitler to remove two armoured divisions from the offensive at
Sukhinichi to deploy them against a threatening Soviet counter-
attack in the Rzhev area. Hitler had refused, insisting that they be
retained for the Sukhinichi offensive. Kluge had marched out saying
‘You, my Fuhrer, therefore assume responsibility for this.’

And in the north, by the end of August expectations of launching
an assault and finally taking the hunger-torn city of Leningrad had
been massively dented through the Soviet counter-offensive south of

Lake Ladoga. Manstein’s 11th Army had been brought up from the
southern front to lead the planned final assault on Leningrad in
September in the ‘Northern Lights’ offensive. Instead it found itself
engaged in fending off the Soviet strike. There was no possibility of
capturing Leningrad and razing it to the ground. The last chance of
that had gone. Hitler’s outward show of confidence in victory could
not altogether conceal his mounting inner anxiety. His temper was
on a short fuse. Outbursts of rage became more common. He cast
around as always for scapegoats for the rapidly deteriorating
military situation in the east. It did not take him long to find them.

Relations with Halder had already reached rock-bottom. On 24
August, the worsening situation at Rzhev had prompted the Chief of
the General Staff to urge Hitler to allow a retreat of the 9th Army to
a more defensible shorter line. In front of all those assembled at the
midday conference, Hitler rounded on Halder. ‘You always come
here with the same proposal, that of withdrawal,’ he raged. ‘I
demand from the leadership the same toughness as from the front-
soldiers.’ Halder, deeply insulted, shouted back: ‘I have the
toughness, my Fuhrer. But out there brave musketeers and
lieutenants are falling in thousands and thousands as useless
sacrifice in a hopeless situation simply because their commanders
are not allowed to make the only reasonable decision and have their
hands tied behind their backs.’ Hitler stared at Halder. ‘What can
you, who sat in the same chair in the First World War, too, tell me
about the troops, Herr Halder, you, who don’t even wear the black
insignia of the wounded?’ Appalled, and embarrassed, the onlookers
dispersed. Hitler tried to smooth Halder’s ruffled feathers that
evening. But it was plain to all who witnessed the scene that the
Chief of Staff ’s days were numbered.

Even Hitler’s military right-hand, the loyal and devoted Jodl, was
now made to feel the full impact of his wrath. On 5 September List
had asked for Jodl to be sent to Army Group A headquarters at
Stalino, north of the Sea of Azov, to discuss the further deployment
of the 39th Mountain Corps. The visit took place two days later.
From Hitler’s point of view, the purpose was to urge List to

accelerate the advance on the largely stalled Caucasus front. Hitler’s
patience at the lack of progress had been extremely thin for some
time. But far from bringing back positive news, Jodl returned that
evening with a devastating account of conditions. It was no longer
possible to force the Soviets back over the mountain passes. The
most that could be achieved, with greater mobility and maximum
concentration of forces, was a last attempt to reach Grozny and the
Caspian Sea. Hitler grew more angry with every sentence. He
lashed out at the ‘lack of initiative’ of the army leadership; and now
for the first time attacked Jodl, the messenger bearing bad news. It
was the worst crisis in relations between Hitler and his military
leaders since the previous August. Hitler was in a towering rage.
But Jodl stood his ground. It turned into a shouting-match. Jodl
fully backed List’s assessment of the position. Hitler exploded. He
accused Jodl of betraying his orders, being talked round by List, and
taking sides with the Army Group. He had not sent him to the
Caucasus, he said, to have him bring back doubts among the troops.
Jodl retorted that List was faithfully adhering to the orders Hitler
himself had given. Beside himself with rage, Hitler said his words
were being twisted. Things would have to be different. He would
have to ensure that he could not be deliberately misinterpreted in
future. Like a prima donna in a pique, Hitler stormed out, refusing
to shake hands (as he invariably had done at the end of their
meetings) with Jodl and Keitel. Evidently depressed as well as
angry, he said to his Wehrmacht adjutant Schmundt that night, ‘T’ll
be glad when I can take off this detestable uniform and trample on
it.’ He saw no end to the war in Russia since none of the aims of
summer 1942 had been realized. The anxiety about the forthcoming
winter was dreadful, he said. ‘But on the other hand,’ noted Army
Adjutant Engel, ‘he will retreat nowhere.’

Hitler now shut himself up in his darkened hut during the days.
He refused to appear for the communal meals. The military
briefings, with as few present as possible, took place in a glacial
atmosphere in his own hut, not in the headquarters of the
Wehrmacht staff. And he refused to shake hands with anyone.

Within forty-eight hours, a group of shorthand typists arrived at
FHQ. Hitler had insisted upon a record of all military briefings
being taken so that he could not again be misinterpreted.

The day after the confrontation with Jodl, Hitler dismissed List.
Demonstrating his distrust of his generals, he himself for the time
being took over the command of Army Group A. He was now
commander of the armed forces, of one branch of those armed
forces, and of one group of that branch. At the same time, Keitel
was deputed to tell Halder that he would soon be relieved of his
post. Keitel himself and Jodl were also rumoured to be slated for
dismissal. Jodl admitted privately that he had been at fault in trying
to point out to a dictator where he had gone wrong. This, Jodl said,
could only shake his self-confidence — the basis of his personality
and actions. Jodl added that whoever his own replacement might
be, he could not be more of a staunch National Socialist than he
himself was.

In the event, the worsening conditions at Stalingrad and in the
Mediterranean prevented the intended replacement of Jodl by
Paulus and Keitel by Kesselring. But there was no saving Halder.
Hitler complained bitterly to Below that Halder had no
comprehension of the difficulties at the front and was devoid of
ideas for solutions. He coldly viewed the situation only from maps
and had ‘completely wrong notions’ about the way things were
going. Hitler pondered Schmundt’s advice to replace Halder by
Major-General Kurt Zeitzler, a very different type of character - a
small, bald-headed, ambitious, dynamic forty-seven-year-old, firm
believer in the Fithrer, who had been put in by Hitler in April to
shake up the army in the west and, as Rundstedt’s chief of staff, to
build up coastal defences. Goring, too, encouraged Hitler to get rid
of Halder.

That point was reached on 24 September. A surprised Zeitzler had
by then been summoned to FHQ and told by Hitler of his promotion
to full General of the Infantry and of his new responsibilities. After
what was to be his last military briefing, Halder was, without
ceremony, relieved of his post. His nerves, Hitler told him, were

gone, and his own nerves also strained. It was necessary for Halder
to go, and for the General Staff to be educated to believe fanatically
in ‘the idea’. Hitler, Halder noted in his final diary entry, was
determined to enforce his will, also in the army.

The traditional General Staff, for long such a powerful force, its
Chief now discarded like a spent cartridge, had arrived at its
symbolic final point of capitulation to the forces to which it had
wedded itself in 1933. Zeitzler began the new regime by demanding
from the members of the General Staff belief in the Fiuhrer. He
himself would soon realize that this alone would not be enough.

The battle for Stalingrad was by now looming. Both sides were
aware how critical it would be. The German leadership remained
optimistic.

Hitler’s plans for the massively over-populated city on the Volga
were similar to the annihilatory intentions he had held about
Leningrad and Moscow. ‘The Fuhrer orders that on entry into the
city the entire male population should be done away with,’ the
Wehrmacht High Command recorded, ‘since Stalingrad, with its
thoroughly Communist population of a million, is especially
dangerous.’ Halder noted simply, without additional comment:
‘Stalingrad: male population to be destroyed, female to be
deported.’

When he visited FHQ on 11 September, Colonel-General von
Weichs, Commander of Army Group B, had told Hitler he was
confident that the attack on the inner city of Stalingrad could begin
almost immediately and be completed within ten days. Indeed, the
early signs were that the fall of the city would not be long delayed.
But by the second half of September, the contest for Stalingrad had
already turned into a battle of scarcely imaginable intensity and
ferocity. The fighting was taking place often at point-blank range,
street by street, house by house. German and Soviet troops were
almost literally at each other’s throats. The final taking of what had

rapidly become little more than a shell of smoking ruins, it was
coming to be realized, could take weeks, even months.

Elsewhere, too, the news was less than encouraging. Rommel’s
offensive at El Alamein in the direction of the Suez Canal had to be
broken off already on 2 September, only three days after it had
begun. Rommel remained confident, both publicly and in private,
over the next weeks, though he reported on the serious problems
with shortages of weapons and equipment when he saw Hitler on 1
October to receive his Field-Marshal’s baton. In reality, however,
the withdrawal of 2 September would turn out to be the beginning
of the end for the Axis in North Africa. Its morale revitalized under
a new commander, General Bernard Montgomery, and its lost, out-
of-date armour replaced by new Sherman tanks, the 8th Army
would by autumn prove more than a match for Rommel’s limited
forces.

In the Reich itself, the British nightly raids had intensified.
Munich, Bremen, Dtisseldorf, and Duisburg were among the cities
that now suffered serious destruction. Hitler said he was glad his
own apartment in Munich had been badly damaged; he would not
have liked it spared — obviously it would not have looked good — if
the rest of the city had been attacked. He thought the raid might
have a salutary effect in waking up the population of Munich to the
realities of the war. Air-raids had another good side, he had told
Goebbels in mid-August: the enemy had ‘taken work from us’ in
destroying buildings that would in any case have had to be torn
down to allow the improved post-war town planning.

At the end of September, Hitler flew back to Berlin. He had
promised Goebbels to use the opening of the Winter Aid campaign
to address the nation during the second half of September. Once
more, it was important to sustain morale at a vital time.

His Sportpalast speech on 30 September combined a glorification
of German military achievements with a sarcastic, mocking attack
on Churchill and Roosevelt. This was nothing new, though the hand-
picked Sportpalast audience lapped it up. He went on to repeat his
prophecy about the Jews — by now a regular weapon in his

rhetorical armoury — in the most menacing phrases he had so far
used: ‘The Jews used to laugh, in Germany too, about my
prophecies. I don’t know if they’re still laughing today, or whether
the laughter has already gone out of them. But I, too, can now only
offer the assurance: the laughter will go out of them everywhere.
And I will also be right in my prophecies.’ But the speech was most
notable of all for his assurances about the battle for Stalingrad. The
metropolis on the Volga, bearing the Soviet leader’s name, was
being stormed, he declared, and would be taken. ‘You can be sure,’
he added, ‘that nobody will get us away from this place again!’

His public display of optimism was unbounded, even in a more
confined forum, when he addressed the Reichs- and Gauleiter for
almost three hours the following afternoon. ‘The capture of
Stalingrad,’ recorded Goebbels, ‘is for him an established fact,’ even
if it could still take a little time. Surveying the position of his
enemies, Hitler came to the remarkable conclusion that ‘the war
was practically lost for the opposing side, no matter how long it
was in a position to carry it on’.

Hitler’s absurd optimism at the beginning of October scarcely
accorded with the growing anxieties of his military advisers about
the situation in Stalingrad. Winter was now no longer far off.
Paulus, Weichs, Jodl, and Zeitzler all favoured pulling back from a
target which, largely in ruins, had by now lost all significance as a
communications and armaments centre, and taking up more secure
winter positions. The only alternative was to pour in heavy
reinforcements. Hitler’s view was that this time winter had been so
well prepared for that the soldiers in the east would be living better
than most of them had done in peacetime.

On 6 October, after Paulus had reported a temporary halt to the
attack because his troops were exhausted, Hitler ordered the
‘complete capture’ of Stalingrad as the key objective of Army Group
B. There might indeed have been something to be said for choosing
the protection of even a ruined city to the open, exposed steppes
over the winter had the supplies situation been as favourable as
Hitler evidently imagined it to be, had the supply lines been secure,

and had the threat of a Soviet counter-offensive been less large.
However, only insufficient winter provision for the 6th Army had
been made. Supply-lines were now overstretched on an enormously
long front, and far from secure on the northern flank. And
intelligence was coming in of big concentrations of Soviet troops
which might pose real danger to the position of the 6th Army.
Withdrawal was the sensible option.

Hitler would not hear of it. At the beginning of October, Zeitzler
and Jodl heard him for the first time, in outrightly rejecting their
advice about the danger of being bogged down in house-to-house
fighting with heavy losses, stress that the capture of the city was
necessary not just for operational, but for ‘psychological’ reasons: to
show the world the continued strength of German arms, and to
boost the morale of the Axis allies. More than ever contemptuous of
generals and military advisers who lacked the necessary strength of
will, he refused to countenance any suggestion of withdrawal from
Stalingrad. Fear of loss of face had taken over from military
reasoning. Hitler’s all too public statements in the Sportpalast and
then to his Gauleiter had meant that taking Stalingrad had become a
matter of prestige. And, though he claimed the fact that the city
bore Stalin’s name was of no significance, retreat from precisely this
city would clearly compound the loss of prestige.

In the meantime, Hitler was starting to acknowledge mounting
concern among his military advisers about the build-up of Soviet
forces on the northern banks of the Don, the weakest section of the
front, where the Wehrmacht was dependent on the resolution of its
allied armies — the Romanians, Hungarians, and Italians.

The situation in North Africa was by this time also critical.
Montgomery’s 8th Army had begun its big offensive at El Alamein
on 23 October. Rommel had quickly been sent back from sick-leave
to hold together the defence of the Axis forces and prevent a
breakthrough. Hitler’s initial confidence that Rommel would hold
his ground had rapidly evaporated. Lacking fuel and munitions, and
facing a numerically far superior enemy, Rommel was unable to
prevent Montgomery’s tanks penetrating the German front in the

renewed massive onslaught that had begun on 2 November. The
following day, Hitler sent a telegram in response to Rommel’s
depressing account of the position and prospects of his troops. ‘In
the situation in which you find yourself,’ ran his message to
Rommel, ‘there can be no other thought than to stick it out, not to
yield a step, and to throw every weapon and available fighter into
the battle.’ Everything would be done to send reinforcements. ‘It
would not be the first time in history that the stronger will
triumphed over stronger enemy battalions. But you can show your
troops no other way than victory or death.’ Rommel had not waited
for Hitler’s reply. Anticipating what it would be, he had ordered a
retreat hours before it arrived. Generals had been peremptorily
dismissed for such insubordination during the winter crisis at the
beginning of the year. Rommel’s standing with the German people —
only weeks earlier, he had been féted as a military hero — was all
that now saved him from the same ignominy.

By 7 November, when Hitler travelled to Munich to give his
traditional address in the Lowenbraukeller to the marchers in the
1923 Putsch, the news from the Mediterranean had dramatically
worsened. En route from Berlin to Munich, his special train was
halted at a small station in the Thuringian Forest for him to receive
a message from the Foreign Office: the Allied armada assembled at
Gibraltar, which had for days given rise to speculation about a
probable landing in Libya, was disembarking in Algiers and Oran. It
would bring the first commitment of American ground-troops to the
war in Europe.

Hitler immediately gave orders for the defence of Tunis. But the
landing had caught him and his military advisers off-guard. And
Oran was out of reach of German bombers, which gave rise to a
new torrent of rage at the incompetence of the Luftwaffe’s lack of
planning. Further down the track, at Bamberg, Ribbentrop joined
the train. He pleaded with Hitler to let him put out peace feelers to
Stalin via the Soviet Embassy in Stockholm with an offer of far-
reaching concessions in the east. Hitler brusquely dismissed the
suggestion: a moment of weakness was not the time for

negotiations with an enemy. In his speech to the party’s ‘Old Guard’
on the evening of 8 November, Hitler then publicly ruled out any
prospect of a negotiated peace. With reference to his earlier ‘peace
offers’, he declared: ‘From now on there will be no more offer of
peace.’

It was hardly the atmosphere which Hitler would have chosen for
a big speech. Not only had he nothing positive to report; the speech
had to take place in the midst of a military crisis. But if the party’s
‘Old Fighters’ expected any enlightenment from Hitler on the
situation, they were to be disappointed. The usual verbal assaults on
Allied leaders and blustering parallels with the internal situation
before the ‘seizure of power’ were all he had to offer. Refusal to
compromise, the will to fight, determination to overcome the
enemy, the lack of any alternative than complete success, and the
certainty of final victory in a war for the very existence of the
German people formed the basis of the message. Unlike the Kaiser,
who had capitulated in the First World War at ‘quarter to twelve’,
he ended, so he stated, ‘in principle always at five past twelve’. And
for the fourth and last time in the year, Hitler invoked his
‘prophecy’ about the Jews.

The speech was not one of Hitler’s best. He had been a
compelling speaker when he had been able to twist reality in
plausible fashion for his audience. But now, he was ignoring
unpalatable facts, or turning them on their head. The gap between
rhetoric and reality had become too wide. To most Germans, as SD
reports were making apparent, Hitler’s speeches could no longer
have more than a superficial impact. The news of the Allied landing
in North Africa cast a deep pall of gloom about mighty forces
stacked against Germany in a war whose end seemed even farther
away than ever. This came on top of growing unease about
Stalingrad. Criticism of the German leadership for embroiling
people in such a war was now more commonplace (if necessarily for
the most part carefully couched), and often implicitly included
Hitler — no longer detached, as he used to be, from the negative side
of the regime.

But Hitler’s key audience had, primarily, been not the millions
glued to their radio-sets, but his oldest party loyalists inside the
hall. It was essential to reinforce this backbone of Hitler’s personal
power, and of the will to hold together the home front. Here,
among this audience, Hitler could still tap much of the enthusiasm,
commitment, and fanaticism of old. He knew the chords to play.
The music was a familiar tune. But everyone there must have
recognized — and in some measure shared — a sense of self-deception
in the lyrics.

Hitler’s real concern that evening was the reaction of the French
to the events in North Africa. He decided upon a meeting in Munich
with Laval and Mussolini. By then, news was coming in that the
initial resistance was crumbling in French North Africa. The landing
had been secured.

By the time Ciano arrived in Munich — Mussolini felt unwell and
declined to go — Hitler had heard that General Henri Giraud had put
himself at the service of the Allies and been smuggled out of France
and transported to North Africa. Commander of the French 7th
Army before the debacle of 1940 and imprisoned since that time,
Giraud had escaped captivity and fled to unoccupied France earlier
in the year. The danger was that he would now provide a
figurehead for French resistance in North Africa and a focus of
support for the Allies. Suspicion, which soon proved justified, was
also mounting by the hour that Admiral Jean Francois Darlan, too,
head of the French armed forces, was preparing to change sides.
The Americans had won Darlan over just before the ‘Torch’ landings
with an offer to recognize him as head of the French government.
Inevitable conflict with the British, who favoured General Charles
de Gaulle (the leader of ‘Free France’, exiled in London), was to be
obviated when a young French monarchist assassinated Darlan just
before Christmas.

Hitler had stressed the need to be ready to occupy southern
France in his talks with Mussolini at the end of April. When Ciano
met Hitler on the evening of 9 November, he had made up his mind.
Laval’s input would be irrelevant. Hitler would not ‘modify his

already definite point of view: the total occupation of France,
landing in Corsica, a bridgehead in Tunisia’. When he eventually
arrived, Laval was treated with scarcely more than contempt. Hitler
demanded landing points in Tunisia. Laval tried to wring
concessions from Italy. Hitler refused to waste time on such
deliberations.

While Laval was in the next room having a smoke, Hitler gave
the order to occupy the remainder of France next day - 11
November, and the anniversary of the Armistice of 1918. Laval was
to be informed next morning. In a letter to Marshal Pétain and a
proclamation to the French people, Hitler justified the occupation
through the necessity to defend the coast of southern France and
Corsica against Allied invasion from the new base in North Africa.
That morning, German troops occupied southern France without
military resistance, in accordance with the plans for ‘Operation
Anton’ which had been laid down in May.

At the Berghof for a few days, Hitler’s mask of ebullience slipped
a little. Below found him deeply worried about the Anglo-American
actions. He was also concerned about supplies difficulties in the
Mediterranean, which British submarines had intensified. His trust
in the Italians had disappeared. He was sure that they were leaking
intelligence about the movement of German supply ships to the
British. The deficiencies of the Luftwaffe also preoccupied him. As
regards the eastern front, he was hoping for ‘no new surprises’, but
feared a large-scale Soviet offensive was imminent.

Vil

On 19 November, Zeitzler told Hitler that the Soviet offensive had
begun. Immediately, the Soviet forces to the north-west and west of
Stalingrad broke through the weak part of the front held by the
Romanian 3rd Army. General Ferdinand Heim’s 48th Panzer Corps
was sent in, but failed to heal the breach. Furious, Hitler dismissed
Heim. He later ordered him to be sentenced to death — a sentence
not carried out only through the intervention of Schmundt. The next

day the Red Army’s ‘Stalingrad Front’ broke through the divisions of
the Romanian 4th Army south of the city and met up on 22
November with the Soviet forces that had penetrated from north
and west. With that, the 220,000 men of the 6th Army were
completely encircled.

Hitler had decided to return to the Wolf ’s Lair that evening. His
train journey back from Berchtesgaden to East Prussia took over
twenty hours, owing to repeated lengthy stops to telephone
Zeitzler. The new Chief of the General Staff insisted on permission
being granted to the 6th Army to fight their way out of Stalingrad.
Hitler did not give an inch. Already on 21 November he had sent an
order to Paulus: ‘6th Army to hold, despite danger of temporary
encirclement.’ On the evening of 22 November, he ordered: ‘The
army is temporarily encircled by Russian forces. I know the 6th
Army and its Commander-in-Chief and know that it will conduct
itself bravely in this difficult situation. The 6th Army must know
that I am doing everything to help it and to relieve it.” He thought
the position could be remedied. Relief could be organized to enable
a break-out. But this could not be done overnight. A plan was
hastily devised to deploy Colonel-General Hermann Hoth’s 4th
Panzer Army, south-west of Stalingrad, to prepare an attack to
relieve the 6th Army. But it would take about ten days before it
could be attempted. In the meantime, Paulus had to hold out, while
the troops were supplied by air-lift. It was a major, and highly risky
operation. But Goring assured Hitler that it could be done. The
Luftwaffe Chief of Staff Hans Jeschonnek did not contradict him.
Zeitzler, however, vehemently disagreed. And from within the
Luftwaffe itself, Colonel-General Wolfram Freiherr von Richthofen,
who normally had Hitler’s ear, raised the gravest doubts both on
grounds of the weather (with temperatures already plummeting, icy
mists, and freezing rain icing up the wings of the planes) and of the
numbers of available aircraft. Hitler chose to believe Goring.

Hitler’s decision to air-lift supplies to the 6th Army until relief
arrived was taken on 23 November. By then he had heard from
Paulus that stores of food and equipment were perilously low and

certainly insufficient for a defence of the position. Paulus sought
permission to attempt to break out. Weichs, Commander-in-Chief of
Army Group B, and Chief of the General Staff Zeitzler also fully
backed this as the only realistic option. Zeitzler, evidently acting on
the basis of a remarkable misunderstanding, actually informed
Weichs at 2 a.m. on 24 November that he had ‘persuaded the Fuhrer
that a break-out was the only possibility of saving the army’. Within
four hours the General Staff had to transmit exactly the opposite
decision by Hitler: the 6th Army had to stand fast and would be
supplied from the air until relief could arrive. The fate of almost
quarter of a million men was sealed with this order.

Hitler was not totally isolated in military support for his decision.
Field-Marshal von Manstein had arrived that morning, 24
November, at Army Group B headquarters to take command, as
ordered by Hitler three days earlier, of anew Army Group Don
(which included the trapped 6th Army). The main objective was to
shore up the weakened front south and west of Stalingrad, to secure
the lines to Army Group A in the Caucasus. He also took command
of General Hoth’s attempt to relieve the 6th Army. But in contrast
to Paulus, Weichs, and Zeitzler, Manstein did not approve an
attempt to break out before reinforcements arrived, and took an
optimistic view of the chances of an air-lift. Manstein was one of
Hitler’s most trusted generals. His assessment can only have
strengthened Hitler’s own judgement.

By mid-December, Manstein had changed his view diametrically.
Richthofen had persuaded him that, in the atrocious weather
conditions, an adequate air-lift was impossible. Even if the weather
relented, air supplies could not be sustained for any length of time.
Manstein now pressed on numerous occasions for a decision to
allow the 6th Army to break out. But by then the chances of a
break-out had grossly diminished; in fact, once Hoth’s relief attempt
was held up in heavy fighting some fifty kilometres from Stalingrad
and some days later finally forced back, they rapidly became non-
existent. On 19 December, Hitler once more rejected all pleas to
consider a break-out. Military information in any case now

indicated that the 6th Army, greatly weakened and surrounded by
mighty Soviet forces, would be able to advance a maximum of
thirty kilometres to the south-west — not far enough to meet up with
Hoth’s relief panzer army. On 21 December, Manstein asked
Zeitzler for a final decision on whether the 6th Army should attempt
to break out as long as it could still link with the 57th Panzer Corps,
or whether the Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe could
guarantee air-supplies over a lengthy period of time. Zeitzler cabled
back that Goring was confident that the Luftwaffe could supply the
6th Army, though Jeschonnek was by now of a different opinion.
Hitler allowed an inquiry of the 6th Army Command about the
distance it could expect to advance towards the south if the other
fronts could be held. The reply came that there was fuel for twenty
kilometres, and that it would be unable to hold position for long.
Hoth’s army was still fifty-four kilometres away. Still no decision
was taken. ‘It’s as if the Fuhrer is no longer capable [of taking one],’
noted the OKW’s war-diarist Helmuth Greiner.

6th Army Command itself described the tactic of a mass break-out
without relief from the outside — ‘Operation Thunderclap’ — as ‘a
catastrophe-solution’ (‘Katastrophenlosung’). That evening, Hitler
dismissed the idea: Paulus only had fuel for a short distance; there
was no possibility of breaking out. Two days later, on 23 December,
Manstein had to remove units from Hoth’s 4th Panzer Army to hold
the crumbling left flank of his Army Group. With that, Hoth had to
pull back his weakened forces. The attempt to break the siege of
Stalingrad had failed. The 6th Army was doomed.

Paulus still sought permission to break out. But by Christmas Eve,
Manstein had given up trying to persuade Hitler to give approval to
what by this time could only be seen as a move of sheer
desperation, without hope of success. The main priority was now to
hold the left flank to prevent an even worse catastrophe. This was
essential to enable the retreat of Army Group A from the Caucasus.
Zeitzler had put the urgency of this retreat to Hitler on the evening
of 27 December. Hitler had reluctantly agreed, then later changed
his mind. It was too late. Zeitzler had telephoned through Hitler’s

initial approval. The retreat from the Caucasus was under way.
Stalingrad had become a lesser priority.

Preoccupied though he was with the eastern front, and in
particular with the now inevitable catastrophe in Stalingrad, Hitler
could not afford to neglect what was happening in North Africa. And
he was increasingly worried about the resolve of his Italian allies.

Montgomery had forced Rommel’s Afrika Corps into headlong
retreat, and would drive the German and Italian army out of Libya
altogether during January 1943. Encouraged by Goring, Hitler was
now convinced that Rommel had lost his nerve. But at least the
50,000 German and 18,000 Italian troops rushed to Tunis in
November and December had seriously held up the Allies,
preventing their rapid domination of North Africa and ruling out an
early assault on the European continent itself. Even so, Hitler knew
the Italians were wobbling. Goring’s visit to Rome at the end of
November had confirmed that. Their commitment to the war was by
now in serious doubt. And when Ciano and Marshal Count Ugo
Cavalero, the head of the Italian armed forces, arrived at the Wolf ’s
Lair on 18 December for three days of talks, it was in the immediate
wake of the catastrophic collapse of the Italian 8th Army,
overwhelmed during the previous two days by the Soviet offensive
on the middle stretches of the Don. When Ciano put Mussolini’s case
for Germany coming to terms with the Soviet Union in order to put
maximum effort into defence against the western powers, Hitler
was dismissive. Were he to do that, he replied, he would be forced
within a short time to fight a reinvigorated Soviet Union once more.
The Italian guests were non-committal towards Hitler’s exhortations
to override all civilian considerations in favour of supplies for North
Africa.

For the German people, quite especially for the many German
families with loved ones in the 6th Army, Christmas 1942 was a
depressing festival. The triumphalist propaganda of September and
October, suggesting that victory at Stalingrad was just around the
corner, had given way in the weeks following the Soviet counter-
offensive to little more than ominous silence. Rumours of the

encirclement of the 6th Army — passed on through despairing letters
from the soldiers entrapped there — swiftly spread. It soon became
evident that the rumours were no less than the truth.

A series of letters from senior officers in the 6th Army, describing
their plight in graphic detail, were received by Hitler’s Luftwaffe
Adjutant, Nicolaus von Below. He showed them to Hitler, reading
out key passages. Hitler listened without comment, except once
remarking inscrutably that ‘the fate of the 6th Army left for all of us
a deep duty in the fight for the freedom of the our people’. What he
really thought, no one knew.

After Paulus had rejected a call to surrender, the final Soviet
attack to destroy the 6th Army began on 10 January. An emissary to
the Wolf ’s Lair, seeking permission for Paulus to have freedom of
action to bring an end to the carnage, went unheeded by Hitler. On
15 January, he commissioned Field-Marshal Erhard Milch, the
Luftwaffe’s armaments supremo and mastermind of all its
transportation organization, with flying 300 tons of supplies a day
to the besieged army. It was pure fantasy — though partly based on
the inaccurate information that Zeitzler complained about on more
than one occasion. Snow and ice on the runways in sub-arctic
temperatures often prevented take-offs and landings. In any case, on
22 January the last airstrip in the vicinity of Stalingrad was lost.
Supplies could now only be dropped from the air. The remaining
frozen, half-starved troops, under constant heavy fire, were often
unable to salvage them.

By this time, the German people were already being prepared for
the worst. After a long period of silence, the Wehrmacht report on
16 January had spoken in ominous terms of a ‘heroically courageous
defensive struggle against the enemy attacking from all sides’. The
press was instructed to speak of ‘the great and stirring heroic
sacrifice which the troops encircled at Stalingrad are offering the
German nation’.

Hitler had bluntly described the plight of the 6th Army to
Goebbels on 22 January. There was scarcely a hope of rescuing the
troops. It was a ‘heroic drama of German history’. News came in as

they talked, outlining the rapidly deteriorating situation. Hitler was
said by Goebbels to have been ‘deeply shaken’. But he did not
consider attaching any blame to himself. He complained bitterly
about the Luftwaffe, which had not kept its promises about levels of
supplies. Schmundt separately told Goebbels that these had been
illusory. Goring’s staff had given him the optimistic picture they
presumed he wanted, and he had passed this on to the Fihrer. It
was a problem that afflicted the entire dictatorship — up to and
including Hitler himself. Only positive messages were acceptable.
Pessimism (which usually meant realism) was a sign of failure.
Distortions of the truth were built into the communications system
of the Third Reich at every level — most of all in the top echelons of
the regime.

Even more than he felt let down by his own Luftwaffe, Hitler
voiced utter contempt for the failure of the German allies to hold
the line against the Soviet counter-attack. The Romanians were bad,
the Italians worse, and worst of all were the Hungarians. The
catastrophe would not have occurred had the entire eastern front
been controlled by German units, as he had wanted. The German
bakers’ and baggage-formations, he fumed, had performed better
than the élite Italian, Romanian, and Hungarian divisions. But he
did not think the Axis partners were ready to desert. Italy would
‘like to dance out of line’; though as long as Mussolini was there,
this could be ruled out. The Duce was clever enough to know that it
would mean the end of Fascism, and his own end. Romania was
essential to Germany for its oil, Hitler said. He had made it plain to
the Romanians what would come their way should they attempt
anything stupid.

Hitler still hoped — at least that is what he told Goebbels — that
parts of the 6th Army could hold out until they could be relieved. In
fact, he knew better than anyone that there was not the slightest
chance of it. The 6th Army was on its last legs. On 22 January, the
very day that Goebbels had had his talks with Hitler at FHQ, Paulus
had requested permission to surrender. Hitler rejected it. He then
rejected a similar plea from Manstein to allow the 6th Army’s

surrender. As a point of honour, he stated, there could be no
question of capitulation. In the evening, he telegraphed the 6th
Army to say that it had made an historic contribution in the greatest
struggle in German history. The army was to stand fast ‘to the last
soldier and the last bullet’.

Since 23 January the 6th Army had been beginning to break up.
It was split in two as Soviet troops cutting through from the south
and the west of the city joined forces. By 26 January the division of
the 6th Army was complete. One section raised the white flag on
the 29th. The same day, Paulus sent Hitler a telegram of
congratulations on the tenth anniversary of his take-over of power
on the 30th.

The ‘celebrations’ in Germany for the anniversary of Hitler’s day
of triumph in January 1933 were in a low key. All bunting was
banned. Hitler did not give his usual speech. He remained in his
headquarters and left it to Goebbels to read out his proclamation. A
single sentence referred to Stalingrad: ‘The heroic struggle of our
soldiers on the Volga should be a warning for everybody to do the
utmost for the struggle for Germany’s freedom and the future of our
people, and thus in a wider sense for the maintenance of our entire
continent.’ In Stalingrad itself, the end was approaching. Feelers
were put out by the remnants of the 6th Army to the Soviets that
very evening, 30 January 1943, for a surrender. Negotiations took
place next day. On that day, the announcement was made that
Paulus had been promoted to Field-Marshal. He was expected to end
the struggle with a hero’s death. In the evening, he surrendered.
Two days later, on 2 February, the northern sector of the
surrounded troops also gave in. The battle of Stalingrad was over.
Around 100,000 men from twenty-one German and two Romanian
divisions had fallen in battle. A further 113,000 German and
Romanian soldiers were taken prisoner. Only a few thousand would
survive their captivity.

Hitler made no mention of the human tragedy when he met his
military leaders at the midday conference on 1 February. What
concerned him was the prestige lost through Paulus’s surrender. He
found it impossible to comprehend, and impossible to forgive. ‘Here
a man can look on while 50-60,000 of his soldiers die and defend
themselves bravely to the last. How can he give himself up to the
Bolsheviks?’ he asked, nearly speechless with anger at what he saw
as a betrayal. He could have no respect for an officer who chose
captivity to shooting himself. ‘How easy it is to do something like
that. The pistol — that’s simple. What sort of cowardice does it take
to pull back from it?’ ‘No one else is being made field-marshal in
this war,’ he avowed (though he did not keep to his word). He was
certain — it proved an accurate presumption — that, in Soviet hands,
Paulus and the other captured generals would within no time be
promoting anti-German propaganda. Drawing on horror-stories of
tortures in Russian prisons that had circulated in the volkisch press
since the early 1920s, he said: ‘They’ll lock them up in the rat-cellar,
and two days later they’ll have them so softened-up that they’ll talk
straight away ... They’ll now come into the Lubljanka, and there
they’ll be eaten by rats. How can someone be so cowardly? I don’t
understand it. So many people have to die. Then such a man goes
and besmirches in the last minute the heroism of so many others.
He could release himself from all misery and enter eternity,
national immortality, and he prefers to go to Moscow. How can
there be a choice? That’s crazy.’

For the German people, Paulus’s missed chance to gain
immortality was scarcely a central concern. Their thoughts, when
they heard the dreaded announcement — false to the last — on 3
February that the officers and soldiers of the 6th Army had fought
to the final shot and ‘died so that Germany might live’, were of the
human tragedy and the scale of the military disaster. The ‘heroic
sacrifice’ was no consolation to bereft relatives and friends.

The SD reported that the whole nation was ‘deeply shaken’ by the
fate of the 6th Army. There was deep depression, and widespread
anger that Stalingrad had not been evacuated or relieved while

there was still time. People asked how such optimistic reports had
been possible only a short time earlier. They were critical of the
underestimation — as in the previous winter — of the Soviet forces.
Many now thought the war could not be won, and were anxiously
contemplating the consequences of defeat.

Hitler had until Stalingrad been largely exempted from whatever
criticisms people had of the regime. That now altered sharply. His
responsibility for the debacle was evident. People had expected
Hitler to give an explanation in his speech on 30 January. His
obvious reluctance to speak to the nation only heightened the
criticism. The regime’s opponents were encouraged. Graffiti chalked
on walls attacking Hitler, ‘the Stalingrad Murderer’, were a sign
that underground resistance was not extinct. Appalled at what had
happened, a number of army officers and highly-placed civil
servants revived conspiratorial plans largely dormant since 1938-9.

In Munich, a group of students, together with one of their
professors, whose idealism and mounting detestation at the criminal
inhumanity of the regime had led them the previous year to form
the ‘White Rose’ opposition-group, now openly displayed their
attack on Hitler. The medical students Alexander Schmorell and
Hans Scholl had formed the initial driving-force, and had soon been
joined by Christoph Probst, Sophie Scholl (Hans’s sister), Willi Graf,
and Kurt Huber, Professor of Philosophy at Munich University,
whose critical attitude to the regime had influenced them in lectures
and discussions. All the students came from conservative, middle-
class backgrounds. All were fired by Christian beliefs and
humanistic idealism. The horrors on the eastern front, experienced
for a short time at first hand when Graf, Schmorell, and Hans Scholl
were called up, converted the lofty idealism into an explicit,
political message. ‘Fellow Students!’ ran their final manifesto
(composed by Professor Huber), distributed in Munich University
on 18 February. ‘The nation is deeply shaken by the destruction of
the men of Stalingrad. The genial strategy of the World War [I]
corporal has senselessly and irresponsibly driven three hundred and

thirty thousand German men to death and ruin. Fuhrer, we thank
you!’

It was a highly courageous show of defiance. But it was suicidal.
Hans and Sophie Scholl were denounced by a porter at the
university (who was subsequently applauded by pro-Nazi students
for his action), and quickly arrested by the Gestapo. Christoph
Probst was picked up soon afterwards. Their trial before the
‘People’s Court’, presided over by Roland Freisler, took place within
four days. The verdict — the death-sentence — was a foregone
conclusion. All three were guillotined the same afternoon. Willi
Graf, Kurt Huber, and Alexander Schmorell suffered the same fate
some months later. Other students on the fringe of the movement
were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment.

The regime had been badly stung. But it was not at the point of
collapse. It would lash back without scruple and with utter
viciousness at the slightest hint of opposition. The level of brutality
towards its own population was about to rise sharply as external
adversity mounted.

If Hitler felt any personal remorse for Stalingrad or human
sympathy for the dead of the 6th Army and their relatives, he did
not let it show. Those in his close proximity could detect the signs
of nervous strain. He hinted privately at his worry that his health
would not stand up to the pressure. His secretaries had to put up
with even longer nocturnal monologues as his insomnia developed
chronic proportions. The topics were much the same as ever: his
youth in Vienna, the ‘time of struggle’, the history of mankind, the
nature of the cosmos. There was no relief from the boredom for his
secretaries, who by now knew his outpourings on all topics more or
less off by heart. Even the occasional evenings listening to records
to break up the tedium had stopped. Hitler, as he had told Goebbels
some weeks earlier, now no longer wanted to listen to music.
Talking was like a drug for him. He told one of his doctors two
years later that he had to talk - about more or less anything other
than military issues — to divert him from sleepless nights pondering
troop dispositions and seeing in his mind where every division was

at Stalingrad. As Below guessed, the bad news from the North
African as well as from the eastern front must have led to serious
doubts, in the privacy of his own room in the bunker of his
headquarters, about whether the war could still be won. But
outwardly, even among his entourage at the Wolf’s Lair, he had to
sustain the facade of invincibility. No crack could be allowed to
show. Hitler remained true to his creed of will and strength. A hint
of weakness, in his thinking, was a gift to enemies and subversives.
A crevice of demoralization would then swiftly widen to a chasm.
The military, and above all else the party, leaders must, therefore,
never be allowed a glimmer of any wavering in his own resolution.

There was not a trace of demoralization, depression, or
uncertainty when he spoke to the Reichs- and Gauleiter for almost
two hours at his headquarters on 7 February. He told them at the
very beginning of his address that he believed in victory more than
ever. Then he described what Goebbels referred to as ‘the
catastrophe on the eastern front’. Hitler did not look close to home
for the failings. While he said he naturally accepted full
responsibility for the events of the winter, he left no doubt where in
his view the real fault lay. From the beginning of his political career
— indeed, from what is known of his earliest remarks on politics —
he had cast around for scapegoats. The trait was too embedded in
his psyche for him to stray from it now that, for the first time, an
unmitigated national disaster had to be explained. Addressing the
party leadership, as in his private discussion with Goebbels a
fortnight or so earlier, he once more placed the blame for the
disaster at Stalingrad squarely on the ‘complete failure’ of
Germany’s allies —- the Romanians, Italians, and Hungarians — whose
fighting powers met with his ‘absolute contempt’.

Not just the search for scapegoats, but the feeling of treachery
and betrayal was entrenched in Hitler’s thinking. Another strand of
his explanation for the disaster at Stalingrad was the prospect of
imminent French betrayal, forcing him to retain several divisions,
especially SS-divisions, in the west when they were desperately
needed in the east. But Hitler had the extraordinary capacity, as his

Luftwaffe adjutant Below noted, of turning negative into positive,
and convincing his audience of this. A landing by the Allies in
France would have been far more dangerous, he claimed, than that
which had taken place in North Africa and had been checked
through the occupation of Tunis. He saw grounds for optimism, too,
in the success of the U-boats, and in Speer’s armaments programme
enabling better flak defence against air-raids together with full-scale
production by the summer of the Tiger tank.

Much of the rest of Hitler’s address was on the ‘psychology’ of
war. The crisis was more psychological than material, he declared,
and must therefore be overcome by ‘psychological means’. It was
the party’s task to achieve this. The Gauleiter should remember the
‘time of struggle’. Radical measures were now needed. Austerity,
sacrifice, and the end of any privileges for certain sectors of society
were the order of the day. The setbacks but eventual triumph of
Frederick the Great — the implied comparison with Hitler’s own
leadership was plain — were invoked. The setbacks now being faced,
solely the fault of Germany’s allies, even had their own
psychological advantages. Propaganda and the party’s agitation
could awaken people to the fact that they had stark alternatives:
becoming master of Europe, or undergoing ‘total liquidation and
extermination’.

Hitler pointed out one advantage which, he claimed, the Allies
possessed: that they were sustained by international Jewry. The
consequence, Goebbels reported Hitler as saying, was ‘that we have
to eliminate Jewry not only from Reich territory but from the
whole of Europe’.

Hitler categorically ruled out, as he always had done, any
possibility of capitulation. He stated that any collapse of the
German Reich was out of the question. But his further remarks
betrayed the fact that he was contemplating precisely that. The
event of such a collapse ‘would represent the ending of his life’, he
declared. It was plain who, in such an eventuality, the scapegoats
would be: the German people themselves. ‘Such a collapse could
only be caused through the weakness of the people,’ Goebbels

recorded Hitler as saying. ‘But if the German people turned out to
be weak, they would deserve nothing else than to be extinguished
by a stronger people; then one could have no sympathy for them.’
The sentiment would stay with him to the end.

To the party leadership, the backbone of his support, Hitler could
speak in this way. The Gauleiter could be rallied by such rhetoric.
They were after all fanatics as Hitler himself was. They were part of
his ‘sworn community’. The responsibility of the party for the
radicalization of the ‘home front’ was music to their ears. In any
case, whatever private doubts (if any) they harboured, they had no
choice but to stick with Hitler. They had burnt their boats with him.
He was the sole guarantor of their power.

The German people were less easily placated than Hitler’s
immediate viceroys. When he spoke in Berlin to the nation for the
first time since Stalingrad, on the occasion (which this year, of all
years, he could not possibly avoid) of Heroes’ Memorial Day on 21
March 1943, his speech gave rise to greater criticism than any
Hitler speech since he had become Chancellor.

The speech was one of Hitler’s shortest. Perhaps anxiety about a
possible air-raid made Hitler race through it in such a rapid and
dreary monotone. The routine assault on Bolshevism and on Jewry
as the force behind the ‘merciless war’ could stir little enthusiasm.
Disappointment was profound. Rumours revived about Hitler’s poor
health — along with others that it had been a substitute who had
spoken, while the real Fuhrer was under house-arrest on the
Obersalzberg suffering from a mental breakdown after Stalingrad.
Extraordinary was the fact that Hitler never even directly
mentioned Stalingrad in a ceremony meant to be devoted to the
memory of the fallen and at a time when the trauma was
undiminished. And his passing reference, at the end of his speech, to
a figure of 542,000 German dead in the war was presumed to be far
too low and received with rank incredulity.

Hitler, as more and more ordinary citizens now recognized, had
closed off all avenues that might have brought compromise peace.
The earlier victories were increasingly seen in a different light.

There was no end in sight. But it now seemed clear to increasing
numbers of ordinary citizens that Hitler had taken them into a war
which could only end in destruction, defeat, and disaster. There was
still far to go, but what was revealed after Stalingrad would become
ever clearer: for the vast majority of Germans, the love affair with
Hitler was at an end. Only the bitter process of divorce remained.

23
Beleaguered

‘The English claim that the German people have lost their trust in
the Fuhrer,’ Goebbels declared. It was the opening to the fifth of his
ten rhetorical questions towards the end of his two-hour speech
proclaiming ‘total war’ on the evening of 18 February 1943. The
hand-picked audience in Berlin’s Sportpalast rose as one man to
denounce such an outrageous allegation. A chorus of voices arose:
‘Fuhrer command, we will obey!’ The tumult lasted for what
seemed an age. Orchestrating the frenzied mood to perfection, the
propaganda maestro eventually broke in to ask: ‘Is your trust in the
Fuhrer greater, more faithful, and more unshakeable than ever? Is
your readiness to follow him in all his ways and to do everything
necessary to bring the war to a triumphant end absolute and
unrestricted?’ Fourteen thousand voices hysterically cried out in
unison the answer invited by Goebbels in his bid to quell doubters
at home and to relay to the outside world the futility of any hope of
inner collapse in Germany. Goebbels ended his morale-boosting
peroration — which had been interrupted more than 200 times by
clapping, cheering, shouts of approbation, or thunderous applause —
with the words of Theodor Korner, the patriotic poet from the time
of Prussia’s struggle against Napoleon: ‘Now people, arise — and
storm burst forth!’ The great hall erupted. Amid the wild cheering
the national anthem ‘Deutschland, Deutschland tiber alles’ and the
party’s ‘Horst-Wessel-Lied’ rang out. The spectacle ended with cries
of ‘the great German Leader Adolf Hitler, Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil’.

The speech was intended to demonstrate the complete solidarity
of people and leader, conveying Germany’s utter determination to

carry on, and even intensify, the fight until victory was attained.
But the solidarity, despite the impression temporarily left by
Goebbels’s publicity spectacular, was by this time shrinking fast, the
belief in Hitler among the mass of the population seriously
undermined. What Goebbels did, in fact, was to solicit from his
audience ‘a kind of plebiscitary “Ja” to self-destruction’ in a war
which Germany could by now neither win nor end through a
negotiated peace.

Goebbels’s hopes that the speech would bring him Hitler’s
authorization to concentrate the direction of ‘total war’ in his own
hands were swiftly dashed. The Propaganda Minister had long
pressed for practical measures to radicalize the war effort. Hitler,
shored up by Goring, had, however, resisted imposing increased
hardship and material sacrifice on the civilian population. He was
conscious as ever of the collapse of morale on the home front
during the First World War, certain that this had undermined the
military effort and paved the way for revolution. Nevertheless,
during the Stalingrad crisis he had finally conceded the aim of the
complete mobilization of all conceivable labour and resources of the
home front, and some initial measures had been introduced.

Goebbels had, however, miscalculated. Direction of the ‘total
war’ effort largely bypassed him. His ambitions to take control of
the home front were ignored. Unable to adjudicate in any rational
or systematic fashion in the inevitable conflicts arising from
overlapping and sometimes contradictory spheres of competence,
but careful as always to protect his own power, Hitler never
allowed Goebbels the authority the latter craved on the home front.
The ‘total war’ effort juddered on to partial successes in individual
areas. But the absence of strong, consistent leadership from the top
on the home front produced what Goebbels lamented as ‘a complete
lack of direction in German domestic policy’.

The results of Goebbels’s big speech, therefore, in terms of his
own ambitions to take control of the ‘total war’ effort, were
disappointing. Goebbels was soon to learn anew that he remained
only one player in the power-games to try to secure the backing of

Hitler’s unqualified authority. He would also rapidly realize again
that although the Dictator’s own authority was undiminished, his
physical absence, preoccupation with military matters, and sporadic,
semi-detached involvement in the day-to-day governance of the
Reich meant that he was more than ever exposed to the influence of
those in his presence — ‘the entire baggage of court-idiots and
irresponsible agitators’ — incapable of reconciling or overriding the
competing interests of his feuding barons. Even had he been willing,
therefore, he was completely unable to impose clear strands of
authority to combat the already advanced signs of disintegration in
government and administration.

For Hitler, the months after Stalingrad intensified the familiar,
ingrained character-traits. The facade of often absurd optimism
remained largely intact, even among his inner circle. The show of
indomitable will continued. The flights of fantasy, detached from
reality, took on new dimensions. But the mask slipped from time to
time in remarks revealing deep depression and fatalism. It was
fleeting recognition of what he already inwardly acknowledged: he
had lost the initiative for ever. The recognition invariably brought
new torrents of rage, lashing any who might bear the brunt of the
blame — most of all, as ever, his military leaders. They were all
liars, disloyal, opposed to National Socialism, reactionaries, and
lacking in any cultural appreciation, he ranted. He yearned to have
nothing more to do with them. Ultimately, he would blame the
German people themselves, whom he would see as too weak to
survive and unworthy of him in the great struggle. As setback
followed setback, so the beleaguered Ftihrer resorted ever more
readily to the search for ruthless revenge and retaliation, both on
his external enemies — behind whom, as always, he saw the demonic
figure of the Jew — and on any within who might dare to show
defeatism, let alone ‘betray’ him. There were no personal influences
that might have moderated his fundamental inhumanity. The man
who had been idolized by millions was friendless — apart from (as
he himself commented) Eva Braun and his dog, Blondi.

The war, and the hatreds Hitler had invested in it, consumed him
ever more. Outside the war and his buildings mania, he could rouse
little interest. He was by now in many respects an empty, burnt-out
shell of an individual. But his resilience and strength of will
remained extraordinary. And in the strangely shapeless regime over
which he presided, his power was still immense, unrestricted, and
uncontested.

As the war that Hitler had unleashed ‘came home to the Reich’,
the Dictator — now rapidly ageing, becoming increasingly a physical
wreck, and showing pronounced signs of intense nervous strain —
distanced himself ever more from his people. It was as if he could
not face them now that there were no more triumphs to report, and
he had to take the responsibility for the mounting losses and
misery. Even before the Stalingrad calamity, in early November
1942, when his train had by chance stopped directly alongside a
troop train returning from the east carrying dejected-looking,
battle-weary soldiers, his only reaction had been to ask one of his
manservants to pull down the blinds. As Germany’s war fortunes
plummeted between 1943 and 1945, the former corporal from an
earlier great war never sought to experience at first hand the
feelings of ordinary soldiers.

The number of big public speeches he delivered constituted a
plain indicator of the widening gulf between Fuhrer and people. In
1940 Hitler had given nine big public addresses, in 1941 seven, in
1942 five. In 1943 he gave only two (apart from a radio broadcast
on 10 September). The bulk of his time was spent well away from
the government ministries in Berlin’s WilhelmstrafSe — and well
away from the German people -— at his field headquarters, or at his
mountain eyrie above Berchtesgaden. He spent no more than a few
days in Berlin during the whole of 1943. For some three months in
all he was at the Berghof. During the rest of the time he was cooped
up in his headquarters in East Prussia, leaving aside a number of
short visits to the Ukraine.

Goebbels lamented in July 1943 the way Hitler had cut himself
off from the masses. These, commented the Propaganda Minister,

had provided the acclaim on which his unique authority had rested.
He had given them the belief and trust that had been the focal point
of the regime’s support. But now, in Goebbels’s eyes, that
relationship was seriously endangered — and with it the stability of
the regime. He pointed to the large number and critical tone of the
letters — half of them anonymous - arriving at the Propaganda
Ministry. ‘Above all, the question is again and again raised in these
letters,’ he went on, ‘why the Fuhrer never visits the areas which
have suffered from air-raids ... but especially why the Fiihrer does
not even speak to the German people to explain the current
situation. I regard it as most necessary that the Ftthrer does that,
despite his burden through the events in the military sector. One
can’t neglect the people too long. Ultimately, they are the heart of
our war effort. If the people were once to lose their strength of
resistance and belief in the German leadership, then the most
serious leadership crisis which ever faced us would have been
created.’

The move to ‘total war’, introduced during the Stalingrad crisis,
provided the final demonstration that no semblance of collective
government and rational decision-making within the Reich was
compatible with Hitler’s personal rule.

The drive to mobilize all remaining reserves from the home front
— what came to be proclaimed as ‘total war’ — had its roots in the
need to plug the huge gap in military manpower left by the high
losses suffered by the Wehrmacht during the first months of
‘Barbarossa’.

At Christmas 1942, Hitler had given the orders for more radical
measures to raise manpower for the front and the armaments
industries. Martin Bormann was commissioned to undertake the
coordination of the efforts, in collaboration with Head of the Reich
Chancellery, Hans-Heinrich Lammers. Goebbels and Fritz Sauckel
(Plenipotentiary for Labour Deployment) were immediately

informed. The aim was to close down all businesses whose trade
was in ‘luxury’ items or was otherwise not necessary for the war
effort, and to redeploy the personnel in the army or in arms
production. Women were to be subject to conscription for work.
Releasing men for front-service was impossible, it was agreed,
unless women could replace them in a variety of forms of work.
According to the Propaganda Ministry, the number of women
working had dropped by some 147,000 since the start of the war.
And of 8.6 million women in employment at the end of 1942, only
968,000 worked in armaments.

In the spring of 1942, Hitler had rejected outright the
conscription of women to work in war industries. But by early
1943, the labour situation had worsened to the extent that he was
compelled to concede that the conscription of women could no
longer be avoided. Even the forced labour of, by this time,
approaching 6 million foreign workers and prisoners-of-war could
not compensate for the 11 million or so men who had been called
up to the Wehrmacht. In an unpublished Ftihrer Decree of 13
January 1943, women between seventeen and fifty years old were
ordered to report for deployment in the war effort.

Even before Hitler signed the decree, the wrangling over spheres
of competence had begun in earnest. In order to retain a firm grip
on the ‘total war’ measures and prevent the dissipation of
centralized control, Lammers, backed by the leading civil servants
in the Reich Chancellery, Leo Killy and Friedrich Wilhelm
Kritzinger, suggested to Hitler that all measures should be taken
‘under the authority of the Fuhrer’, and that a special body be set up
to handle them. The idea was to create a type of small ‘war cabinet’.
Lammers thought the most appropriate arrangement would be for
the heads of the three main executive arms of the Fihrer’s authority
— the High Command of the Wehrmacht, the Reich Chancellery, and
the Party Chancellery — to act in close collaboration, meeting
frequently, keeping regular contact with Hitler himself, and
standing above the particularist interests of individual ministries.
Hitler agreed. He evidently saw no possible threat to his position

from such an arrangement. On the contrary: the three persons
involved — Keitel, Lammers, and Bormann - could be guaranteed to
uphold his own interests at the expense of any possible over-mighty
subjects. An indication that this was, indeed, Hitler’s thinking was
the exclusion of Goring, Goebbels, and Speer from the coordinating
body — soon known as the ‘Committee of Three’ (Dreierausschu/s).

From the very outset, the Committee was only empowered to
issue enabling ordinances in accordance with the general guidelines
Hitler had laid down. It was given no autonomy. Hitler reserved, as
always, the final decision on anything of significance to himself.
The ‘Committee of Three’ had, in all, eleven formal meetings
between January and August 1943, but rapidly ran up against
deeply ingrained vested interests both in government ministries and
in party regional offices concerned to hold on to their personnel and
to their spheres of competence which might have been threatened in
any move to centralize and simplify the regime’s tangled lines of
administration. It had little chance of breaking down the fiefdoms
on which Nazi rule rested, and soon revealed that any hopes of
bringing order to the Third Reich’s endemic administrative chaos
were utterly illusory.

Nevertheless, Hitler’s mightiest subjects were determined to do
everything they could to sabotage a development which they saw as
inimical to their own power-positions — and from which they had
been excluded. The first notions of a challenge to the role of the
‘Committee of Three’ were intimated during the reception in
Goebbels’s residence following his ‘total war’ speech on 18
February. Nine days later, Walther Funk (Reich Minister of
Economics), Robert Ley (head of the huge German Labour Front),
and Albert Speer, the powerful armaments minister, met again over
cognac and tea in Goebbels’s stately apartments — gloomy now that
the light-bulbs had been removed to comply with the new ‘total
war’ demands — to see what could be done. Soon afterwards, at the
beginning of March, Goebbels travelled from Berlin down to
Berchtesgaden to plot with Goring a way of sidelining the
Committee. Speer had already sounded him out. In talks lasting five

hours at Goring’s palatial villa on the Obersalzberg, partly with
Speer present, the Reich Marshal, dressed in ‘somewhat baroque
clothes’, was quickly won over.

The Propaganda Minister’s plan — actually it had initally been
suggested by Speer — was to revive the Ministerial Council for the
Defence of the Reich (established under Goring’s chairmanship just
before the outbreak of war but long fallen into desuetude), and to
give it the membership to turn it into an effective body to rule the
Reich, leaving Hitler free to concentrate on the direction of military
affairs. He reminded Goring of what threatened if the war were
lost: ‘Above all as regards the Jewish Question, we are in it so
deeply that there is no getting out any longer. And that’s good. A
Movement and a people that have burnt their boats fight, from
experience, with fewer constraints than those that still have a
chance of retreat.’ The party needed revitalizing. And if Goring
could now reactivate the Ministerial Council and put it in the hands
of Hitler’s most loyal followers, argued Goebbels, the Fihrer would
surely be in agreement. They would choose their moment to put the
proposition to Hitler. This would, they knew, not be easy.

The problem, however, especially as Goebbels saw it, went
beyond the ‘Committee of Three’: it was a problem of Hitler
himself. To rescue the war effort, stronger leadership at home was
needed. Goebbels remained utterly loyal to the person he had for
years regarded as an almost deified father-figure. But he saw in
Hitler’s leadership style — his absence from Berlin, his detachment
from the people, his almost total preoccupation with military
matters, and, above all, his increasing reliance on Bormann for
everything concerning domestic matters — a fundamental weakness
in the governance of the Reich.

In his diary, Goebbels complained of a ‘leadership crisis’. He
thought the problems among the subordinate leaders were so grave
that the Fuhrer ought to sweep through them with an iron broom.
The Fthrer carried, indeed, a crushing burden through the war. But
that was because he would take no decisions to alter the personnel
so that he would not need bothering with every trivial matter.

Goebbels thought — though he expressed it discreetly — that Hitler
was too weak to do anything. ‘When a matter is put to him from the
most varied sides,’ he wrote, ‘the Filhrer is sometimes somewhat
vacillating in his decisions. He also doesn’t always react correctly to
people. A bit of help is needed there.’

When he had spoken privately in his residence to Speer, Funk,
and Ley just over a week after his ‘total war’ speech, he had gone
further. According to Speer’s later account, Goebbels had said on
that occasion: ‘We have not only a “leadership crisis”, but strictly
speaking a “Leader crisis”!’ The others agreed with him. ‘We are
sitting here in Berlin. Hitler does not hear what we have to say
about the situation. I can’t influence him politically,’ Goebbels
bemoaned. ‘I can’t even report to him about the most urgent
measures in my area. Everything goes through Bormann. Hitler
must be persuaded to come more often to Berlin.” Goebbels added
that Hitler had lost his grip on domestic politics, which Bormann
controlled by conveying the impression to the Fuhrer that he still
held the reins tightly in his grasp. With Bormann given the title, on
12 April, of ‘Secretary of the Fuhrer’, the sense, acutely felt by
Goebbels, that the Party Chancellery chief was ‘managing’ Hitler
was even further enhanced.

Goebbels and Speer might lament that Hitler’s hold on domestic
affairs had weakened. But when they saw him in early March,
intending to put their proposition to him that Goring should head a
revamped Ministerial Council for the Defence of the Reich to direct
the home front, it was they who proved weak. Speer had flown to
Hitler’s headquarters, temporarily moved back to Vinnitsa in the
Ukraine, on 5 March to pave the way for a visit by Goebbels. The
Propaganda Minister arrived in Vinnitsa three days later. Straight
away, Speer urged caution. The continued, almost unhindered,
bombing raids on German towns had left Hitler in a foul mood
towards Goring and the inadequacies of the Luftwaffe. It was hardly
a propitious moment to broach the subject of reinstating the Reich
Marshal to the central role in the direction of domestic affairs.
Goebbels thought nonetheless that they had to make the attempt.

At their first meeting, over lunch, Hitler, looking tired but
otherwise well, and more lively than of late, launched as usual into
a bitter onslaught on the generals who, he claimed, were cheating
him wherever they could do so. He carried on in the same vein
during a private four-hour discussion alone with Goebbels that
afternoon. He was furious at Goring, and at the entire Luftwaffe
leadership with the exception of the Chief of the General Staff Hans
Jeschonnek. Characteristically, Hitler thought the best way of
preventing German cities being reduced to heaps of rubble was by
responding with ‘terror from our side’. Despite his insistence to
Speer that they had to go ahead with their proposal, Goebbels
evidently concluded during his discussion with Hitler that it would
be fruitless to do so. ‘In view of the general mood,’ he noted, ‘I
regard it as inopportune to put to the Fithrer the question of
Goring’s political leadership; it’s at present an unsuitable moment.
We must defer the business until somewhat later.’ Any hope of
raising the matter, even obliquely, when Goebbels and Speer sat
with Hitler by the fireside until late in the night was dashed when
news came in of a heavy air-raid on Nuremberg. Hitler fell into a
towering rage about Goring and the Luftwaffe leadership. Speer and
Goebbels, calming Hitler only with difficulty, postponed their plans.
They were never resurrected.

Goebbels and Speer had failed at the first hurdle. Face to face
with Hitler, they felt unable to confront him. Hitler’s fury over
Goring was enough to veto even the prospect of any rational
discussion about restructuring Reich government.

Goebbels was still talking as late as September of finding enough
support to block Lammers’s attempt (as the Propaganda Minister
saw it) to arrogate authority to himself on the back of a Fithrer
decree empowering him to review any disputes between ministers
and decide whether they should be taken to Hitler. But by that time,
there was scant need of intrigue to stymie the ‘Committee of Three’.
It had already atrophied into insignificance.

The failed experiment of the ‘Committee of Three’ showed
conclusively that, however weak their structures, all forms of

collective government were doomed by the need to protect the
arbitrary ‘will of the Fuhrer’. But it was increasingly impossible for
this ‘will’ to be exercised in ways conducive to the functioning of a
modern state, let alone one operating under the crisis conditions of
a major war. As a system of government, Hitler’s dictatorship had
no future.

Ill

Matters at home were far from Hitler’s primary concern in the
spring and summer of 1943. He was, in fact, almost solely
preoccupied with the course of the war. The strain of this had left
its mark on him. Guderian, back in favour after a long absence, was
struck at their first meeting, on 20 February 1943, by the change in
Hitler’s physical appearance since the last time he had seen him,
back in mid-December 1941: ‘In the intervening fourteen months he
had aged greatly. His manner was less assured than it had been and
his speech was hesitant; his left hand trembled.’

When President Roosevelt, at the end of his meeting to discuss
war strategy with Churchill and the Combined Chiefs of Staff at
Casablanca in French Morocco between 14 and 24 January 1943,
had — to the British Prime Minister’s surprise — announced at a
concluding press conference that the Allies would impose
‘unconditional surrender’ on their enemies, it had matched Hitler’s
Valhalla mentality entirely. For him, the demand altered nothing. It
merely added further confirmation that his uncompromising stance
was right. As he told his party leaders in early February, he felt
liberated as a result from any attempts to persuade him to look for
a negotiated peace settlement. It had become, as he had always
asserted it would, a clear matter of victory or destruction. Few,
even of his closest followers, as Goebbels admitted, could still
inwardly believe in the former. But compromises were ruled out.
The road to destruction was opening up ever more plainly. For
Hitler, closing off escape routes had distinct advantages. Fear of
destruction was a strong motivator.

Some of Hitler’s leading generals, most notably Manstein, had
tried to persuade him immediately after Stalingrad that he should, if
not give up the command of the army, at least appoint a supremo
on the eastern front who had his trust. Hitler was having none of it.
After the bitter conflicts over the previous months, he preferred the
compliancy of a Keitel to the sharply couched counter-arguments of
a Manstein. It meant a further weakening of Germany’s military
potential.

Manstein’s push to retake Kharkhov and reach the Donets by mid-
March had been a much-needed success. Over 50,000 Soviet troops
had perished. It had suggested yet again to Hitler that Stalin’s
reserves must be drying up. Immediately, he wanted to go on the
offensive. It was important to strike while the Red Army was still
smarting from the reversal at Kharkhov. It was also necessary to
send a signal to the German population, deeply embittered by
Stalingrad, and to the Reich’s allies, that any doubts in final victory
were wholly misplaced.

At this point, the split in military planning between the army’s
General Staff, directly responsible for the eastern front, and the
operations branch of Wehrmacht High Command (in charge of all
other theatres) surfaced once more. The planners in the High
Command of the Wehrmacht favoured a defensive ploy on all fronts
to allow the gradual build-up and mobilization of resources
throughout Europe for a later grand offensive. The Army High
Command thought differently. It wanted a limited but early
offensive. Chief of the Army General Staff Kurt Zeitzler had devised
an operation involving the envelopment and destruction of a large
number of Soviet divisions on a big salient west of Kursk, an
important rail junction some 300 miles south of Moscow. Five
Soviet armies were located within the westward bulge in the front,
around 120 miles wide and 90 miles deep, left from the winter
campaign of 1942-3. If victorious, the operation would gravely
weaken the Soviet offensive potential.

There was no question which strategy would appeal to Hitler. He
swiftly supported the army’s plan for a decisive strike on a greatly

shortened front — about 150 kilometres compared with 2,000
kilometres in the ‘Barbarossa’ invasion of 1941. The limited scope of
the operation reflected the reduction in German ambitions in the
east since June 1941. Even so, a tactical victory would have been of
great importance. It would, in all likelihood, have eliminated the
prospect of any further Soviet offensive in 1943, thereby freeing
German troops for redeployment in the increasingly threatening
Mediterranean theatre. The order for what was to become
‘Operation Citadel’, issued on 13 March, foresaw a pincer attack by
part of Manstein’s Army Group from the south and Kluge’s from the
north, enveloping the Soviet troops in the bulge. In his confirmation
order of 15 April, Hitler declared: ‘This attack is of decisive
importance. It must be a quick and conclusive success. It must give
us the initiative for this spring and summer ... Every officer, every
soldier must be convinced of the decisive importance of this attack.
The victory of Kursk must shine like a beacon to the world.’ It was
to do so. But hardly as Hitler had imagined.

‘Citadel’ was scheduled to begin in mid-May. As in the previous
two years, however, significant delays set in which were damaging
to the operation’s success. These were not directly of Hitler’s
making. But they did again reveal the serious problems in the
military command-structure and process of decision-making. They
arose from disputes about timing among the leading generals
involved. On 4 May, Hitler met them in Munich to discuss ‘Citadel’.
Manstein and Kluge wanted to press ahead as soon as possible. This
was the only chance of imposing serious losses on the enemy.
Otherwise, they argued, it was better to call off the operation
altogether. They were seriously worried about losing the advantage
of surprise and about the build-up of Soviet forces should there be
any postponement. The heavy defeat at Stalingrad and weakness of
the southern flank deterred other generals from wishing to
undertake a new large-scale offensive so quickly. Colonel-General
Walter Model — known as an especially tough and capable
commander, a reputation which had helped make him one of
Hitler’s favourites, and detailed to lead the 9th Army’s assault from

the north — recommended a delay until reinforcements were
available. He picked up on the belief of Zeitzler, also high in favour
with Hitler, that the heavy Tiger tank, just rolling off the
production lines, and the new, lighter, Panther would provide
Germany with the decisive breakthrough necessary to regaining the
initiative. Hitler had great hopes of both tanks. He gave Model his
backing.

On 4 May, he postponed ‘Citadel’ until mid-June. It was then
further postponed, eventually getting under way only in early July.
Even by that date, fewer Tigers and Panthers were available than
had been envisaged. And the Soviets, tipped off by British
intelligence and by a source within the Wehrmacht High Command,
had built up their defences and were ready and waiting.

Meanwhile, the situation in North Africa was giving grounds for
the gravest concern. Some of Hitler’s closest military advisers, Jodl
among them, had been quietly resigned to the complete loss of
North Africa as early as December 1942. Hitler himself had hinted
at one point that he was contemplating the evacuation of German
troops. But no action had followed. He was much influenced by the
views of the Commander-in-Chief South, Field-Marshal Kesselring,
one of nature’s optimists and, like most in high places in the Third
Reich, compelled in any case to exude optimism whatever his true
sentiments and however bleak the situation was in reality. Hitler
needed optimists to pander to him - yet another form of ‘working
towards the Fuhrer’. In the military arena, this reinforced the
chances of serious strategic blunders.

In March, buoyed by Manstein’s success at Kharkhov, Hitler had
declared that the holding of Tunis would be decisive for the
outcome of the war. It was, therefore, a top priority. With the
refusal to contemplate any withdrawal, the next military disaster
beckoned. When Below flew south at the end of the month to view
the North African front and report back to Hitler, even Kesselring
was unable to hide the fact that Tunis could not be held. Colonel-
General Hans-Jiirgen von Arnim, who had taken over the North
African command from the exhausted and dispirited Rommel, was

of the same opinion. Kesselring’s staff were even more pessimistic:
they saw no chance of successfully fending off an Allied crossing
from Tunis to Sicily once — which they regarded as a certainty —
North Africa had fallen. When Below reported back, Hitler said
little. It seemed to his Luftwaffe adjutant that he had already
written off North Africa and was inwardly preparing himself for the
eventual defection of his Italian partners to the enemy.

In early April, Hitler had spent the best part of four days at the
restored baroque palace of Klessheim, near Salzburg, shoring up
Mussolini’s battered morale — half urging, half browbeating the
Duce to keep up the fight, knowing how weakened he would be
through the massive blow soon to descend in North Africa. Worn
down by the strain of war and depression, Mussolini, stepping down
from his train with assistance, looked a ‘broken old man’ to Hitler.
The Duce also made a subdued impression on interpreter Dr Paul
Schmidt as he pleaded forlornly for a compromise peace in the east
in order to bolster defences in the west, ruling out the possibility of
defeating the USSR. Dismissing such a notion out of hand, Hitler
reminded Mussolini of the threat that the fall of Tunis would pose
for Fascism in Italy. He left him with the impression ‘that there can
be no other salvation for him than to achieve victory with us or to
die’. He exhorted him to do the utmost to use the Italian navy to
provide supplies for the forces there. The remainder of the visit
consisted largely of monologues by Hitler — including long
digressions about Prussian history — aimed at stiffening Mussolini’s
resistance. Hitler was subsequently satisfied that this had been
achieved.

The talks with Mussolini amounted to one of a series of meetings
with his allies that Hitler conducted during April, while staying at
the Berghof. King Boris of Bulgaria, Marshal Antonescu of Romania,
Admiral Horthy of Hungary, Prime Minister Vidkun Quisling of
Norway, President Tiso of Slovakia, ‘Poglavnik’ (Leader) Ante
Pavelic of Croatia, and Prime Minister Pierre Laval from Vichy
France all visited the Berghof or Klessheim by the end of the month.
In each case, the purpose was to stiffen resolve — partly by cajoling,

partly by scarcely veiled threats — and to keep faint-hearts or
waverers tied to the Axis cause.

Hitler let Antonescu know that he was aware of tentative
approaches made by Romanian ministers to the Allies. He posed, as
usual, a stark choice of outright victory or ‘complete destruction’ in
a fight to the end for ‘living space’ in the east. Part of Hitler’s
implicit argument, increasingly, in attempting to prevent support
from seeping away was to play on complicity in the persecution of
the Jews. His own paranoia about the responsibility of the Jews for
the war and all its evils easily led into the suggestive threat that
boats had been burned, there was no way out, and retribution in the
event of a lost war would be terrible. The hint of this was implicit
in his disapproval of Antonescu’s treatment of the Jews as too mild,
declaring that the more radical the measures the better it was when
tackling the Jews.

In his meetings with Horthy at Klessheim on 16-17 April, Hitler
was more brusque. Horthy was berated for feelers to the enemy
secretly put out by prominent Hungarian sources but tapped by
German intelligence. He was told that ‘Germany and its allies were
in the same boat on a stormy sea. It was obvious that in this
situation anyone wanting to get off would drown immediately.’ As
he had done with Antonescu, though in far harsher terms, Hitler
criticized what he saw as an over-mild policy towards the Jews.
Horthy had mentioned that, despite tough measures, criminality and
the black market were still flourishing in Hungary. Hitler replied
that the Jews were to blame. Horthy asked what he was expected to
do with the Jews. He had taken away their economic livelihood; he
could scarcely have them all killed. Ribbentrop intervened at this
point to say that the Jews must be ‘annihilated’ or locked up in
concentration camps. There was no other way. Hitler regaled
Horthy with statistics aimed at showing the strength of former
Jewish influence in Germany. He compared the ‘German’ city of
Nuremberg with the neighbouring ‘Jewish’ town of Ftirth. Wherever
Jews had been left to themselves, he said, they had produced only
misery and dereliction. They were pure parasites. He put forward

Poland as a model. There, things had been ‘thoroughly cleaned up’.
If Jews did not want to work ‘then they would be shot. If they could
not work, then they would have to rot.’ As so often, he deployed a
favourite bacterial simile. “They would have to be treated like
tuberculosis bacilli from which a healthy body could become
infected. This would not be cruel if it were considered that even
innocent creatures, like hares and deer, had to be killed. Why
should the beasts that want to bring us Bolshevism be spared?’

Hitler’s emphasis on the Jews as germ-bacilli, and as responsible
for the war and the spread of Bolshevism, was of course nothing
new. And his deep-seated belief in the demonic power still
purportedly in the hands of the Jews as they were being decimated
needs no underlining. But this was the first time that he had used
the ‘Jewish Question’ in diplomatic discussions to put heads of state
under pressure to introduce more draconian anti-Jewish measures.
What prompted this?

He would have been particularly alerted to the ‘Jewish Question’
in April 1943. The previous month, he had finally agreed to have
what was left of Berlin’s Jewish community deported. In April, he
was sent the breakdown prepared by the SS’s statistician Richard
Korherr of almost a million and a half Jews ‘evacuated’ and
‘channelled through’ Polish camps. From the middle of the month,
he was increasingly frustrated by accounts of the battle raging in
the Warsaw ghetto, where the Waffen-SS, sent in to raze it to the
ground, were encountering desperate and brave resistance from the
inhabitants. Not least, only days before his meeting with Horthy,
mass graves containing the remains of thousands of Polish officers,
murdered in 1940 by the Soviet Security Police, the NKVD, had
been discovered in the Katyn Forest, near Smolensk. Hitler
immediately gave Goebbels permission to make maximum
propaganda capital out of the issue. He also instructed Goebbels to
put the ‘Jewish Question’ at the forefront of propaganda. Goebbels
seized upon the Katyn case as an excellent opportunity to do just
this.

Hitler’s directive to Goebbels to amplify the propaganda
treatment of the persecution of the Jews, and his explicit usage of
the ‘Jewish Question’ in his meetings with foreign dignitaries,
plainly indicate instrumental motives. He believed, as he always
had done, unquestioningly in the propaganda value of antisemitism.
He told his Gauleiter in early May that antisemitism, as propagated
by the party in earlier years, had once more to become the core
message. He held out hopes of its spread in Britain. Antisemitic
propaganda had, he said, to begin from the premiss that the Jews
were the leaders of Bolshevism and prominent in western
plutocracy. The Jews had to get out of Europe. This had constantly
to be repeated in the political conflict built into the war. In his
meetings with Antonescu and Horthy, Hitler was speaking, as
always, for effect. As we have noted, he hoped to bind his wavering
Axis partners closer to the Reich through complicity in the
persecution of the Jews.

Though satisfied with the outcome of his talks with Antonescu,
Hitler felt he had failed to make an impact on Horthy. Horthy had
put forward what Hitler described — only from his perspective could
they be seen as such — as ‘humanitarian counter-arguments’. Hitler
naturally dismissed them. As Goebbels summarized it, Hitler said:
‘Towards Jewry there can be no talk of humanity. Jewry must be
cast down to the ground.’

Earlier in the spring, Ribbentrop, picking up on fears expressed
by Axis partners about their future under German domination, had
put to Hitler loose notions of a future European federation. How
little ice this cut with the Dictator can be seen from his reactions to
his April meetings with heads of state and government —
particularly the unsatisfactory discussion with Horthy. He drew the
conclusion, he told the Gauleiter in early May, that the ‘small-state
rubbish’ should be ‘liquidated as soon as possible’. Europe must
have a new form — but this could only be under German leadership.
‘We live today,’ he went on, ‘in a world of destroying and being
destroyed.’ He expressed his certainty ‘that the Reich will one day
be master of the whole of Europe’, paving the way for world

domination. He hinted at the alternative. ‘The Fuhrer paints a
shocking picture for the Reichs- and Gauleiter of the possibilities
facing the Reich in the event of a German defeat. Such a defeat
must therefore never find a place in our thoughts. We must regard
it from the outset as impossible and determine to fight it to the last
breath.’

Speaking to Goebbels on 6 May in Berlin, where he had come to
attend the state funeral of SA-Chief Viktor Lutze (who had been
killed in a car accident), Hitler accepted that the situation in Tunis
was ‘fairly hopeless’. The inability to get supplies to the troops
meant there was no way out. Goebbels summarized the way Hitler
was thinking: ‘When you think that 150,000 of our best young
people are still in Tunis, you rapidly get an idea of the catastrophe
threatening us there. It'll be on the scale of Stalingrad, and certainly
also produce the harshest criticism among the German people.’ But
when he spoke the next day to the Reichs- and Gauleiter, Hitler
never mentioned Tunis, making no reference at all to the latest
news that Allied troops had penetrated as far as the outskirts of the
city and that the harbour was already in British hands.

Axis troops were, in fact, by then giving themselves up in droves.
Within a week, on 13 May, almost a quarter of a million of them —
the largest number taken so far by the Allies, around half of them
German, the remainder Italian — surrendered. Only about 800
managed to escape. North Africa was lost. The catastrophe left the
Italian Axis partner reeling. For Mussolini, the writing was on the
wall. But for Hitler, too, the defeat was nothing short of calamitous.
One short step across the Straits of Sicily by the Allies would mean
that the fortress of Europe was breached through its southern
underbelly.

In the Atlantic, meanwhile, the battle was in reality lost, even if
it took some months for this to become fully apparent. The
resignation on 30 January 1943 as Commander-in-Chief of the Navy
of Grand-Admiral Raeder, exponent of what Hitler had come to
recognize as an outmoded naval strategy based upon a big surface
battle fleet, and his replacement by Karl Donitz, protagonist of the

U-boat, had signalled an important shift in priorities. Hitler told his
Gauleiter on 7 May that the U-boat was the weapon to cut through
the arteries of the enemy. But, in fact, that very month forty-one U-
boats carrying 1,336 men had been lost in the Atlantic — the highest
losses in any single month during the war — and the number of
vessels in operation at any one time had already passed its peak.
The deciphering of German codes by British intelligence, using the
‘Ultra’ decoder, was allowing U-boat signals to be read. It was
possible to know with some precision where the U-boats were
operating. The use of long-range Liberators, equipped with radar,
and able to cover ‘the Atlantic Gap’ — the 600-mile-wide stretch of
the ocean from Greenland to the Azores, previously out of range of
aircraft flying from both British and American shores — was a second
strand of the mounting Allied success against the U-boat menace.
The crucial supplies between North America and Britain, gravely
imperilled over the previous two years, could flow with increasing
security. Nothing could hinder the Reich’s increasing disadvantage
against the material might of the western Allies.

Hitler’s greatest worry, once Tunis had fallen, was the condition
of his longest-standing ally. By the time he heard a report on the
situation in Italy in mid-May from Konstantin Alexander Freiherr
von Neurath, son of the former Foreign Minister, and one-time
Foreign Office liaison to Rommel’s Afrika Korps, Hitler was deeply
gloomy. He thought the monarchists and aristocracy had sabotaged
the war-effort in Italy from the beginning, despite the Duce’s
personal strength of will. Hitler was sure that the reactionary forces
associated with the King, Victor Emmanuel III — whose nominal
powers as head of state had nevertheless still left him as the focus
of a potential alternative source of loyalty — would triumph over the
revolutionary forces of Fascism. A collapse had to be reckoned with.
Plans must be made to defend the Mediterranean without Italy.
How this was to be done with an offensive imminent in the east and
no troops to spare, he did not say.

Hitler had intended around this time to move back to Vinnitsa.
But the postponement of ‘Citadel’, the precarious situation in the

Mediterranean, and problems with his own health made him decide
suddenly to return from a short stay at the Wolf ’s Lair to the
Obersalzberg. He remained there until the end of June. During his
weeks in the Bavarian Alps, the Ruhr district, Germany’s industrial
heartland, continued to suffer devastation from the skies. In May
there had been spectacular attacks on the big dams that supplied the
area’s water. Had they been sustained, the damage done would have
been incalculable. As it was, the dams could be repaired. Since the
‘dam-buster’ raids, the major cities of Duisburg, Dtisseldorf,
Bochum, Dortmund, and Wuppertal-Barmen had been laid waste in
intensive night bombardment. The inadequacy of the air-defences
was all too apparent. Hitler continued to vent his bile on Goring and
the Luftwaffe. But his own powerlessness to do anything about it
was exposed. Goebbels at least showed his face, touring the
bombed-out cities, speaking at a memorial service in his home town
of Elberfeld, and at a big rally in Dortmund. Hitler stayed in his
alpine idyll. The Propaganda Minister thought a visit by the Fuhrer
psychologically important for the population of the Ruhr. Though
Goebbels had been impressed by the positive response he had
encountered during his staged tour, more realistic impressions of
morale provided in SD reports painted a different picture. Anger at
the regime’s failure to protect them was widespread. The ‘Heil
Hitler’ greeting had almost disappeared. Hostile remarks about the
regime, and about Hitler personally, were commonplace.

Hitler promised Goebbels towards the end of June that he would
pay an extended visit to the devastated area. It was to take place
‘the next week, or the week after that’. Hitler knew only too well
that this was out of the question. He had by then scheduled the
beginning of ‘Citadel’ for the first week in July. And he expected
the Allied landing off the Italian coast at any time. The human
suffering of the Ruhr population had, ultimately, little meaning for
him. ‘As regrettable as the personal losses are,’ he told Goebbels,
‘they have unfortunately to be taken on board in the interest of a
superior war-effort.’

While on the Obersalzberg, Hitler was chiefly preoccupied with
the prospect of an imminent invasion by the Allies in the south, and
the approaching ‘Citadel’ offensive in the east.

He thought that the Allied landing would come in Sardinia. Sicily
was in his view secure enough, and could be held. He thought the
Italians more likely to give in bit by bit in deals with the enemy
than to capitulate outright. His confidence in Mussolini had finally
evaporated. It would be different, he thought, were the Duce still
young and fit. But he was old and worn out. The royal family could
not be trusted an inch. And — he added a characteristic last reflection
— the Jews had not been done away with in Italy, whereas in
Germany (as Goebbels summarized) ‘we can be very glad that we
have followed a radical policy. There are no Jews behind us who
could inherit from us.’

As the war had turned remorselessly against Germany, the
beleaguered Fiihrer had reverted ever more to his obsession with
Jewish responsibility for the conflagration. In his Manichean world-
view, the fight to the finish between the forces of good and evil -
the aryan race and the Jews — was reaching its climax. There could
be no relenting in the struggle to wipe out Jewry.

Little over a month earlier, Hitler had talked at length, prompted
by Goebbels, about the ‘Jewish Question’. The Propaganda Minister
thought it one of the most interesting discussions he had ever had
with the Fiihrer. Goebbels had being re-reading The Protocols of the
Elders of Zion — the crude Russian forgery purporting to outline a
Jewish conspiracy to rule the world — with an eye on its use in
current propaganda. He raised the matter over lunch. Hitler was
certain of the ‘absolute authenticity’ of the Protocols. The Jews, he
thought, were not working to a fixed programme; they were
following, as always, their ‘racial instinct’. The Jews were the same
all over the world, Goebbels noted him as saying, whether in the
ghettos of the east ‘or in the bank palaces of the City [of London] or
Wall Street’, and would instinctively follow the same aims and use
the same methods without the need to work them out together. The
question could well be posed, he went on (according to Goebbels’s

summary of his comments), as to why there were Jews at all. It was
the same question — again the familiar insect analogy — as why there
were Colorado beetles. His most basic belief — life as struggle —
provided, as always, his answer. ‘Nature is ruled by the law of
struggle. There will always be parasitic forms of existence to
accelerate the struggle and intensify the process of selection
between the strong and the weak ... In nature, life always works
immediately against parasites; in the existence of peoples that is not
exclusively the case. From that results the Jewish danger. So there
is nothing else open to modern peoples than to exterminate the
Jews.’

The Jews would use all means to defend themselves against this
‘gradual process of annihilation’. One of its methods was war. It was
the same warped vision embodied in Hitler’s ‘prophecy’: Jews
unleashing war, but bringing about their own destruction in the
process. World Jewry, in Hitler’s view, was on the verge of a
historic downfall. This would take time. He was presumably
alluding to Jews out of German reach, especially in the USA, when
he commented that some decades would be needed ‘to cast them out
of their power. That is our historic mission, which can not be held
up, but only accelerated, by the war. World Jewry thinks it is on
the verge of a world victory. This world victory will not come.
Instead there will be a world downfall. The peoples who have
earliest recognized and fought the Jew will instead accede to world
domination.’

Four days after this conversation, on 16 May, SS-Brigadeftihrer
Jurgen Stroop telexed the news: ‘The Jewish quarter of Warsaw is
no more! The grand operation terminated at 20.15 hours when the
Warsaw synagogue was blown up ... The total number of Jews
apprehended and destroyed, according to record, is 56,065...’ A
force of around 3,000 men, the vast majority from the SS, had used
a tank, armoured vehicles, heavy machine-guns, and artillery to
blow up and set fire to buildings which the Jews were fiercely
defending and to combat the courageous resistance put up by the
ghetto’s inhabitants, armed with little more than pistols, grenades,

and Molotov cocktails. Hitler’s long-standing readiness to link Jews
with subversive or partisan actions made him all the keener to
hasten their destruction. After Himmler had discussed the matter
with him on 19 June, he noted that ‘the Fuhrer declared, after my
report, that the evacuation of the Jews, despite the unrest that
would thereby still arise in the next 3 to 4 months, was to be
radically carried out and had to be seen through’.

Such discussions were always private. Hitler still did not speak of
the fate of the Jews, except in the most generalized fashion, even
among his inner circle. It was a topic which all in his company knew
to avoid. To think of criticizing the treatment of the Jews was, of
course, anathema. The only time the issue was raised occurred
unexpectedly during the two-day visit to the Berghof in late June of
Baldur von Schirach, Gauleiter of Vienna, and his wife, Henriette.
The daughter of his photographer Heinrich Hoffmann, Henriette had
known Hitler since she was a child. She thought she could speak
openly to him. Her husband had, however, fallen from favour
somewhat, partly following Hitler’s disapproval of the modern
paintings on show in an art exhibition which Schirach had staged in
Vienna earlier in the year. Henriette told Baldur on the way to
Berchtesgaden that she wanted to let Hitler know what she had
witnessed recently in Amsterdam, where she had seen a group of
Jewish women brutally herded together and deported. An SS man
had offered her valuables taken from the Jews at a knock-down
price. Her husband told her not to mention it. Hitler’s reactions
were unpredictable. And — a typical response at the time — in any
case she could not change anything.

Already during the first day of their visit, 23 June, Schirach had
managed to prompt an angry riposte from Hitler with a suggestion
that a different policy in the Ukraine might have paid dividends.
Next afternoon, Hitler was in an irritable mood during the statutory
visit to the Tea House. The atmosphere was icy. It remained tense
in the evening when they gathered around the fire in the hall of the
Berghof. Henriette was sitting next to Hitler, nervously rubbing her
hands, speaking quietly. All at once, Hitler jumped up, marched up

and down the room, and fumed: ‘That’s all I need, you coming to
me with this sentimental twaddle. What concern are these Jewish
women to you?’ The other guests did not know where to look.
There was a protracted, embarrassed silence. The logs could be
heard crackling in the fireplace.

When Goebbels arrived, he turned the scene to his advantage by
playing on Hitler’s aversion to Vienna. Hitler rounded on the
hapless Schirach, praising the achievements of Berlin — Goebbels’s
domain, of course — and castigating his Gauleiter’s work in Vienna.
Beside himself with anger, Hitler said it was a mistake ever to have
sent Schirach to Vienna at all, or to have taken the Viennese into the
Reich. Schirach offered to resign. ‘That’s not for you to decide. You
are staying where you are,’ was Hitler’s response. By then it was
four in the morning. Bormann let it be known to the Schirachs that
it would be best if they left. They did so without saying their
goodbyes, and in high disgrace.

The week before the Schirach incident, Hitler had finally decided
to press ahead with the ‘Citadel’ offensive. His misgivings can only
have been increased by Guderian’s reports that the Panther still had
major weaknesses and was not ready for front-line action. And in
the middle of the month, he was presented with the OKW’s
recommendation that ‘Citadel’ should be cancelled. It was now
running so late that there was an increasing chance that it would
clash with the expected Allied offensive in the Mediterranean. Jodl,
just back from leave, agreed that it was dangerous and foolhardy to
commit troops to the east in the interests of, at best, a limited
success when the chief danger at that time lay elsewhere. Again, the
split between the OKW and army leadership came into play. Zeitzler
objected to what he regarded as interference. Guderian suspected
that Zeitzler’s influence was decisive in persuading Hitler to go
ahead. At any rate, Hitler rejected the advice of the Wehrmacht’s
Operations Staff. The opening of the offensive was scheduled for 3
July, then postponed one last time for two more days.

At the end of June, Hitler returned to the Wolf’s Lair for the
beginning of ‘Citadel’. On 1 July, he addressed his commanders. The

decision to go ahead was determined, he stated, by the need to
forestall a Soviet offensive later in the year. A military success
would also have a salutary effect on Axis partners, and on morale at
home. Four days later, the last German offensive in the east was
finally launched. It was the beginning of a disastrous month.

Bombardment from Soviet heavy artillery just before the offensive
began gave a clear indication that the Red Army had been alerted to
the timing of ‘Citadel’. At least 2,700 Soviet tanks had been brought
in to defend Kursk. They faced a similar number of German tanks.
The mightiest tank battle in history raged for over a week. At first
both Model and Manstein made good inroads, if with heavy losses.
The Luftwaffe also had initial successes. But Guderian proved
correct in his warnings of the deficiencies of the Panther. Most
broke down. Few remained in action after a week. Manstein’s drive
was hindered rather than helped by the tank in which such high
hopes had been placed. The ninety Porsche Tigers deployed by
Model also revealed major battlefield weaknesses. They had no
machine-guns, so were ill-equipped for close-range fighting. They
were unable, therefore, to neutralize the enemy. In the middle of
the month, the Soviets launched their own offensive against the
German bulge around Orel to the north of the ‘Citadel’ battlefields,
effectively to Model’s rear. Though Manstein was still advancing,
the northern part of the pincer was now endangered.

On 13 July, Hitler summoned Manstein and Kluge, the two Army
Group Commanders, to assess the situation. Manstein was for
continuing. Kluge stated that Model’s army could not carry on.
Reluctantly, Hitler brought ‘Citadel’ to a premature end. The Soviet
losses were greater. But ‘Citadel’ had signally failed in its
objectives.

Equally dire events were unfolding in the Mediterranean.
Overnight from 9-10 July, reports came in of an armada of ships
carrying large Allied assault forces from North Africa to Sicily. A

landing had been expected — though in Sardinia, not Sicily. The
precise timing caught Hitler unawares. The German troops in Sicily
— only two divisions — were too few in number to hold the entire
coast. Defence relied heavily upon Italian forces. Allied air
superiority was soon all too evident. And alarming news came in of
Italian soldiers casting away their weapons and fleeing. Though
heavy fighting continued throughout July, within two days it was
plain that the Allied landing had been successful. On 19 July, Hitler
flew to see Mussolini in Feltre, near Belluno, in northern Italy. It
was to prove the last time he set foot on Italian soil.

The visit was aimed at bolstering the Duce’s faltering morale and
preventing Italy agreeing a separate peace. Hitler’s generals thought
the visit had been a wasted effort. Hitler himself —- convinced still of
the power of his own rhetoric — probably thought he had once more
succeeded in stirring Mussolini’s fighting spirits. He was soon
disabused. On the very evening after the Feltre talks, he was shown
an intelligence report sent on by Himmler that a coup d’état was
being planned to replace Mussolini by Marshal Pietro Badoglio.

During the course of Saturday, 24 July, reports started to come in
that the Fascist Grand Council had been summoned for the first time
since early in the war. The Council’s lengthy deliberations
culminated in an astonishing vote to request the King to seek a
policy more capable of saving Italy from destruction. Later that
morning, the King told Mussolini that, since the war appeared lost
and army morale was collapsing, Marshal Badoglio would take over
his offices as prime minister. As a stunned Duce left the royal
chambers, he was bundled into a waiting ambulance and driven off
at speed to house-arrest on the Mediterranean island of Ponza.

By the time of the evening military briefing in the Fuhrer
Headquarters, the sensational news from Italy had broken, though
there was still not complete clarity. Almost the entire session was
taken up with the implications. Since Italy had not pulled out of the
war, plans to occupy the country in such an event — code-named
‘Alarich’ — could not be put into operation. But in a highly agitated
mood, Hitler demanded immediate action to occupy Rome and

depose the new regime. He denounced what had taken place as
‘naked treachery’, describing Badoglio as ‘our grimmest enemy’. He
still had belief in Mussolini — so long as he was propped up by
German arms. Presuming the Duce still at liberty, he wanted him
brought straight away to Germany. He was confident that in that
event the situation could still be remedied. He fumed that he would
send troops to Rome the next day to arrest the ‘rabble’ — the entire
government, the King, the Crown Prince, Badoglio, the ‘whole
bunch’. In two or three days there would then be another coup. He
had Goring — ‘ice-cold in the most serious crises’, as he had
repeatedly stated at midday, the Reich Marshal’s failings as head of
the Luftwaffe temporarily forgotten — telephoned and told him to
come as quickly as he could to the Wolf ’s Lair. Rommel was located
in Salonika and summoned to present himself without delay. Hitler
intended to put him in overall command in Italy. He wanted
Himmler contacted. Goebbels, too, was telephoned and told to leave
immediately for East Prussia. The situation, Goebbels
acknowledged, was ‘extraordinarily critical’. Ribbentrop, still not
recovered from a chest infection, was ordered up from Fuschl, his
residence in the Salzkammergut near Salzburg. Soon after midnight,
Hitler met his military leaders for the third time in little over
twelve hours, frantically improvising details for the evacuation
from Sicily and the planned occupation of Rome, and for the seizure
of the members of the new Italian government.

At ten o’clock that morning, 26 July, Hitler met Goebbels and
Goring, just arrived in FHQ. Ribbentrop joined them half an hour
later. Hitler gave his interpretation of the situation. He presumed
that Mussolini had been forced out of power. Whether he was still
alive was not known, but he would certainly be unfree. Hitler saw
the forces of Italian freemasonry — banned by Mussolini but still at
work behind the scenes — behind the plot. Ultimately, he claimed,
the coup was directed at Germany since Badoglio would certainly
come to an arrangement with the British and Americans to take
Italy out of the war. The British would now look for the best
moment for a landing in Italy —- perhaps in Genoa in order to cut off

German troops in the south. Military precautions to anticipate such
a move had to be taken.

Hitler explained, too, his intention of transferring a parachute
division, currently based in southern France, to Rome as part of the
move to occupy the city. The King, Badoglio, and the members of
the new government would be arrested and flown to Germany.
Once they were in German hands, things would be different.
Possibly Roberto Farinacci, the radical Fascist boss of Cremona and
former Party Secretary, who had escaped arrest by fleeing to the
German Embassy and was now en route to FHQ, could be made head
of a puppet government if Mussolini himself could not be rescued.
Hitler saw the Vatican, too, as deeply implicated in the plot to oust
Mussolini. In the military briefing just after midnight he had talked
wildly of occupying the Vatican and ‘getting out the whole lot of
swine’. Goebbels and Ribbentrop dissuaded him from such rash
action, certain to have damaging international repercussions. Hitler
still pressed for rapid action to capture the new Italian government.
Rommel, who by then had also arrived in FHQ, opposed the
improvised, high-risk, panicky response. He favoured a carefully
prepared action; but that would probably take some eight days to
put into place. The meeting ended with the way through the crisis
still unclear.

The midday military conference was again taken up with the
issue of moving troops to Italy to secure above all the north of the
country, and with the hastily devised scheme to capture the
Badoglio government. Field-Marshal von Kluge, who had flown in
from Army Group Centre — desperately trying to hold the Soviet
offensive in the Orel bulge, to the north of Kursk — was abruptly
told of the implications of the events in Italy for the eastern front.
Hitler said he needed the crack Waffen-SS divisions currently
assigned to Manstein in the south of the eastern front to be
transferred immediately to Italy. That meant Kluge giving up some
of his forces to reinforce Manstein’s weakened front. Kluge
forcefully pointed out, though to no avail, that this would make
defence in the Orel region impossible. But the positions on the

Dnieper being prepared for an orderly retreat by his troops to be
taken up before winter were far from ready. What he was being
asked to do, protested Kluge, was to undertake ‘an absolutely
overhasty evacuation’. ‘Even so, Herr Feldmarshall: we are not
master here of our own decisions,’ rejoined Hitler. Kluge was left
with no choice.

Meanwhile, Farinacci had arrived. His description of what had
happened and his criticism of Mussolini did not endear him to
Hitler. Any idea of using him as the figurehead of a German-
controlled regime was discarded. Hitler spoke individually to his
leading henchmen before, in need of a rest after a hectic twenty-
four hours, retiring to his rooms to eat alone. He returned for a
lengthy conference that evening, attended by thirty-five persons.
But the matter was taken no further. Within a few days, he was
forced to concede that any notion of occupying Rome and sending
in a raiding party to take the members of the Badoglio government
and the Italian royal family captive was both precipitate and wholly
impracticable. The plans were called off. Hitler’s attention focused
now on discovering the whereabouts of the Duce and bringing him
into German hands as soon as possible.

With the Italian crisis still at its height, the disastrous month of
July drew to a close amid the heaviest air-raids to date. Between 24
and 30 July, the Royal Air Force’s Bomber Command, using the
release of aluminium strips to blind German radar, unleashed
‘Operation Gomorrha’ — a series of devastating raids on Hamburg,
outdoing in death and destruction anything previously experienced
in the air-war. Waves of incendiaries whipped up horrific fire-
storms, turning the city into a raging inferno, consuming everything
and everybody in their path. People suffocated in their thousands in
cellars or were burnt to cinders on the streets. An estimated 30,000
people lost their lives; over half a million were left homeless;
twenty-four hospitals, fifty-eight churches, and 277 schools lay in
ruins; over 50 per cent of the city was completely gutted. As usual,
Hitler revealed no sense of remorse at any human losses. He was
chiefly concerned about the psychological impact. When he was

given news that fifty German planes had mined the Humber

estuary, he exploded: ‘You can’t tell the German people in this
situation: that’s mined; 50 planes have laid mines! That has no effect
at all ... You only break terror through terror! We have to have
counter-attacks. Everything else is rubbish.’

Hitler mistook the mood of a people with whom he had lost
touch. What they wanted, in their vast majority, was less the
retaliation that was Hitler’s only thought than proper defence
against the terror from the skies and — above all else — an end to the
war that was costing them their homes and their lives. But Hitler
remained, as he had been throughout the agony of Hamburg, more
taken up with events in Italy.

Though he had still rejected any evacuation of Sicily, insistent
that the enemy should not set foot on the Italian mainland,
Kesselring had taken steps to prepare the ground for what proved a
brilliantly planned evacuation on the night of 11 - 12 August,
catching the Allies by surprise and allowing 40,000 German and
62,000 Italian troops, with their equipment, to escape to safety. But
as August drew on, suspicions mounted that it would not be long
before the Italians defected. And at the end of the month, directives
for action in the event of an Italian defection, in the drawer for
months and now refashioned under the code-name ‘Axis’, were
issued.

Under the pressure of the events in Italy, Hitler had finally made
one overdue move at home. For months, egged on by Goebbels, he
had expressed his dissatisfaction with the Reich Minister of the
Interior, Wilhelm Frick, whom he contemptuously regarded as ‘old
and worn-out’. But he could think of no alternative. He continued to
defer any decision until the toppling of Mussolini concentrated his
mind, persuading him that the time had come to stiffen the grip on
the home front and eliminate any prospect of poor morale turning
into subversive action. The man he could depend upon to do this
was Close at hand.

On 20 August he appointed Reichsfiihrer-SS Heinrich Himmler as
the new Reich Minister of the Interior. The appointment amounted

to Hitler’s tacit recognition that his authority at home now rested
on police repression, not the adulation of the masses he had once
enjoyed.

On 3 September the first British troops crossed the Straits of
Messina to Italy, landing at Reggio di Calabria. That same day, the
Italians secretly signed their armistice with the Allies which became
public knowledge five days later.

On 8 September Hitler had flown for the second time within a
fortnight to Army Group South’s headquarters at Zaporozhye, on the
lower Dnieper north of the Sea of Azov, to confer with Manstein
about the increasingly critical situation on the southern flank of the
eastern front. It was to be the last time he set foot on territory
captured from the Soviet Union. A few days earlier, following
Soviet breakthroughs, he had been forced to authorize withdrawal
from the Donets Basin — so important for its rich coal deposits — and
from the Kuban bridgehead over the Straits of Kerch, the gateway
to the Crimea. Now the Red Army had breached the thin seam
which had knitted together Kluge’s and Manstein’s Army Groups
and was pouring through the gap. Retreat was the only possible
course of action.

Hitler found a tense atmosphere at the Wolf’s Lair on his return.
What he had long anticipated was reality. British and American
newspapers had that morning, 8 September, carried reports that the
capitulation of the Italian army was imminent. By the afternoon, the
news was hardening. At 6 p.m. that evening the stories were
confirmed by the BBC in London. Once again, Nazi leaders were
summoned to Filhrer Headquarters for a crisis-meeting next day.
The order had meanwhile been given to set ‘Operation Axis’ in
motion. ‘The Ftihrer,’ wrote Goebbels, ‘is determined to make a
tabula rasa in Italy.’

The BBC’s premature announcement gave the OKW’s Operations
Staff a head start. Sixteen German divisions had been moved to the
Italian mainland by this time. The battle-hardened SS units
withdrawn from the eastern front in late July and early August and
troops pulled back from Sicily, Corsica, and Sardinia were in

position to take control in central Italy. By 10 September, Rome
was in German hands. Italian troops were disarmed. Small pockets
of resistance were ruthlessly put down; one division that held out
until 22 September ended with 6,000 dead. Over 650,000 soldiers
entered German captivity. Only the bulk of the small navy and
ineffective air-force escaped and were given over to the Allies.
Within a few days Italy was occupied by its former Axis partner.

Hours after the Italian capitulation, the Allies had landed in the
Gulf of Salerno, thirty miles or so south-east of Naples. The dogged
German resistance they encountered for a week before
reinforcements enabled them to break out of their threatened
beachhead -— linking forces with troops from Montgomery’s 8th
Army advancing northwards from Reggio di Calabria, and entering
Naples on 1 October — was an indicator of what was in store for the
Allies during the coming months as the Wehrmacht made them fight
for every mile of their northward progression.

It was plain to the German leadership, however, that it would be
even more difficult, in the new situation, for the armed forces to
cope with the mounting pressures on both the eastern and the
southern fronts. Goebbels saw the need looming to seek peace with
either the Soviet Union or the western Allies. He suggested the time
had come to sound out Stalin. Ribbentrop took the same line. He
had tentative feelers put out to see whether the Soviet dictator
would bite. But Hitler dismissed the idea. If anything, he said, he
preferred to look for an arrangement with Britain — conceivably
open to one. But, as always, he would not consider negotiating from
a position of weakness. In the absence of the decisive military
success he needed, which was receding ever more into the far
distance, any hope of persuading him to consider an approach other
than the remorseless continuation of the struggle was bound to be
illusory.

At least Goebbels, backed by Goring, successfully this time
pleaded with Hitler to speak to the German people. To the last
minute before recording the broadcast, on 10 September, Hitler
showed his reluctance. He wanted to delay, to see how things

turned out. Goebbels went through the text with him line by line.
Eventually, he got the Fithrer to the microphone. The speech itself —
largely confined to unstinting praise for Mussolini, condemnation of
Badoglio and his supporters, the claim that the ‘treachery’ had been
foreseen and every necessary step taken, and a call to maintain
confidence and sustain the fight — had nothing of substance to offer,
other than a hint at coming retaliation for the bombing of German
cities. But Goebbels was satisfied. Reports suggested the speech had
gone down well, and helped revive morale.

As far as the situation in Italy itself was concerned, Hitler was at
this time resigned to losing any hold over the south of the country.
His intention was to withdraw to the Apennines, long foreseen by
the OKH Operations Staff as the favoured line of defence. However,
he worried about the Allies advancing from Italy through the
Balkans. By autumn, this concern was to persuade him to change his
mind and defend Italy much farther to the south. A consequence
was to tie down forces desperately needed elsewhere.

The Wehrmacht’s rapid successes in taking hold of Italy so
speedily provided some relief. Hitler’s spirits then soared
temporarily when the stunning news came through on the evening
of 12 September that Mussolini, whose whereabouts had been
recently discovered, had been freed from his captors in a ski hotel
on the highest mountain in the Abruzzi through an extraordinarily
daring raid by parachutists and SS-men carried in by glider and led
by the Austrian SS-Hauptsturmfthrer Otto Skorzeny. The euphoria
did not last long. Hitler greeted the ex-Duce warmly when
Mussolini, no longer the preening dictator but looking haggard and
dressed soberly in a dark suit and black overcoat, was brought to
Rastenburg on 14 September. But Mussolini, bereft of the trappings
of power, was a broken man. The series of private talks they had
left Hitler ‘extraordinarily disappointed’. Three days later, Mussolini
was dispatched to Munich to begin forming his new regime. By the
end of September he had set up his reconstituted Fascist ‘Repubblica
di Salo’ in northern Italy, a repressive, brutish police state run by a
combination of cruelty, corruption, and thuggery — but operating

unmistakably under the auspices of German masters. The one-time
bombastic dictator of Italy was now plainly no more than Hitler’s
tame puppet, and living on borrowed time.

As autumn progressed, the situation on the eastern front
predictably worsened. The redeployment of troops to Italy
weakened the chances of staving off the Soviet offensive. And the
failure to erect the ‘eastern wall’ of fortifications along the Dnieper
during the two years that it had been in German hands now proved
costly. The speed of the Soviet advance gave no opportunity to
construct any solid defence line. By the end of September the Red
Army had been able to cross the Dnieper and establish important
bridgeheads on the west banks of the great river. The German
bridgehead at Zaporozhye was lost in early October. By then, the
Wehrmacht had been pushed back about 150 miles along the
southern front. German and Romanian troops were also cut off on
the Crimea, which Hitler refused to evacuate, fearing, as of old, the
opportunities it would give for air-attacks on Romanian oil-fields,
and concerned about the message it would send to Turkey and
Bulgaria. By the end of the month, the Red Army had pushed so far
over the big bend of the Dnieper in the south that any notion of the
Germans holding their intended defensive line was purely fanciful.
To the north, the largest Soviet city in German hands, Kiev, was
recaptured on 5-6 November. Manstein wanted to make the attempt
to retake it. For Hitler, the lower Dnieper and the Crimea were
more important. Control of the lower Dnieper held the key to the
protection of the manganese ores of Nikopol, vital for the German
steel industry. And should the Red Army again control the Crimea,
the Romanian oil-fields would once more be threatened from the
air. But, whatever Hitler’s thirst for new military successes, the
reality was that by the end of 1943, the limitless granaries of the
Ukraine and the industrial heartlands of the northern Caucasus, seen
by Hitler on so many occasions as vital to the war effort (as well as
the source of future German prosperity in the ‘New Order’), were
irredeemably lost.

Not lost, however, was the war against the Jews. By autumn 1943,
‘Aktion Reinhard’ was terminated: in the region of 1% million Jews
had been killed in the gas-chambers of extermination camps at
Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka in eastern Poland. The SS leadership
were now pressing hard for the extension of the ‘Final Solution’ to
all remaining corners of the Nazi imperium — even those where the
deportations were likely to have diplomatic repercussions. Among
these were Denmark and Italy.

In September, Hitler complied with the request of Werner Best,
the Reich Plenipotentiary in Denmark, to have the Danish Jews
deported, dismissing Ribbentrop’s anxieties about a possible general
strike and other civil disobedience. Though these did not
materialize, the round-up of Danish Jews was a resounding failure.
Several hundred — under ten per cent of the Jewish population —
were captured and deported to Theresienstadt. Most escaped.
Countless Danish citizens helped the overwhelming majority of their
Jewish countrymen - in all 7,900 persons, including a few hundred
non-Jewish marital partners — to flee across the Sound to safety in
neutral Sweden in the most remarkable rescue action of the war.

In October, Hitler accepted Ribbentrop’s recommendation
(prompted by the Reich Security Head Office) to have Rome’s 8,000
Jews sent ‘as hostages’ to the Austrian concentration camp at
Mauthausen. Again, the ‘action’ to round up the Jews misfired. Most
of the Jewish community were able to avoid capture. Some were
hidden by disgusted non-Jewish citizens. Thousands found shelter in
Rome’s convents and monasteries, or in the Vatican itself. In return,
the Papacy was prepared to maintain public silence on the outrage.
Despite Hitler’s directive, following his Foreign Minister’s advice,
those Jews captured were not, in fact, sent to Mauthausen. Of the
1,259 Jews who fell into German hands, the majority were taken
straight to Auschwitz.

Hitler’s compliance with SS demands to speed up and finish off
the ‘Final Solution’ was unquestionably driven by his wish to

complete the destruction of those he held responsible for the war.
He wanted, now as before, to see the ‘prophecy’ he had declared in
1939 and repeatedly referred to fulfilled. But, even more so than in
the spring when he had encouraged Goebbels to turn up the volume
of antisemitic propaganda, there was also the need, with backs to
the wall, to hold together his closest followers in a sworn
‘community of fate’, bonded by their own knowledge of and
implication in the extermination of the Jews.

On 4 October, Reichsfiihrer-SS Heinrich Himmler spoke openly
and frankly about the killing of the Jews to SS leaders gathered in
the town hall in Posen, the capital of the Warthegau. He said he was
‘referring to the Jewish evacuation programme, the extermination
of the Jewish people’. It was, he went on, ‘a glorious page in our
history, and one that has never been written and never can be
written. For we know how difficult we would have made it for
ourselves if, on top of the bombing raids, the burdens and the
deprivations of war, we still had Jews today in every town as secret
saboteurs, agitators, and troublemakers. We would now probably
have reached the 1916-17 stage when the Jews were still part of
the body of the German people.’ The mentality was identical with
Hitler’s. ‘We had the moral right, we had the duty to our people,’
Himmler concluded, ‘to destroy this people which wanted to destroy
us ... We do not want in the end, because we have exterminated a
bacillus, to become ill through the bacillus and die.’ The vocabulary,
too, was redolent of Hitler’s own. Himmler did not refer to Hitler.
There was no need to do so. The key point for the Reichsftihrer-SS
was not to assign responsibility to a single person. The crucial
purpose of his speech was to stress their joint responsibility, that
they were all in it together.

Two days later, in the same Golden Hall in Posen, Himmler
addressed the Reichs- and Gauleiter of the party. The theme was the
same one. He gave, as Goebbels recorded, an ‘unvarnished and
candid picture’ of the treatment of the Jews. Himmler declared: ‘We
faced the question: what should we do with the women and
children? I decided here too to find a completely clear solution. I

did not regard myself as justified in exterminating the men — that is
to say, to kill them or have them killed — and to allow the avengers
in the shape of the children to grow up for our sons and
grandchildren. The difficult decision had to be taken to have this
people disappear from the earth.” Himmler seemed to be indicating
that the extension of the killing to women and children had been his
initiative. He immediately, however, associated himself and the SS
with a ‘commission’ — ‘the most difficult which we have had so far’.
The Gauleiter, among them Goebbels who had spoken directly with
Hitler on the subject so many times, would have had no difficulty in
presuming whose authority lay behind the ‘commission’. Again, the
purpose of the remarkably frank disclosures on the taboo subject
was plain. Himmler marked on a list those who had not attended his
speech or noted its contents.

Himmler’s speeches, ensuring that his own subordinates and the
party leadership were fully in the picture about the extermination of
the Jews, had been — there can be no doubt about it — carried out
with Hitler’s approval. The very next day, after listening to
Himmler, the Gauleiter were ordered to attend the Wolf ’s Lair to
hear Hitler himself give an account of the state of the war. That the
Fuhrer would speak explicitly on the ‘Final Solution’ was
axiomatically ruled out. But he could now take it for granted that
they understood there was no way out. Their knowledge underlined
their complicity. ‘The entire German people know,’ Hitler had told
the Reichs- and Gauleiter, ‘that it is a matter of whether they exist
or do not exist. The bridges have been destroyed behind them. Only
the way forward remains.’

When (for the last time, as it turned out) Hitler addressed the
party’s Old Guard in Munich’s Lowenbraukeller on the putsch
anniversary, 8 November, he was as defiant as ever. There would be
no capitulation, no repeat of 1918, he declared once again — the
nightmare of that year indelibly imprinted on his psyche — and no
undermining of the front by subversion at home. Any overheard
subversive or defeatist remark, it was clear, would cost the person
making it his or her head.

By this time — though of course he made no hint of it in his
speech — Hitler was anxious about a looming new grave military
threat, one which, if not repulsed, would result in Germany’s
destruction: what he took to be the certainty of an invasion in the
west during the coming year. ‘The danger in the east remains,’ ran
his preamble to his Directive No. 51 on 3 November, ‘but a greater
danger is looming in the west: the Anglo-Saxon landing! ... If the
enemy succeeds here in breaking through our defence on a broad
front, the consequences within a short time are unforeseeable.
Everything suggests that the enemy, at the latest in spring but
perhaps even earlier, will move to attack the western front of
Europe.’

To his military advisers, on 20 December, he said he was certain
that the invasion would take place some time after mid-February or
early March. The next months would be spent in preparation for the
coming great assault in the west. This, Hitler remarked, would
‘decide the war’.

24
Hoping for Miracles

‘The year 1944 will make tough and severe demands of all
Germans. The course of the war, in all its enormity, will reach its
critical point during this year. We are fully confident that we will
successfully surmount it.’ This, and the prospect of new cities rising
resplendently after the war from the bombed-out ruins, was all
Hitler had to offer readers of his New Year proclamation in 1944.
Fewer than ever of them were able to share his confidence. For the
embattled soldiers at the front, Hitler’s message was no different.
The military crisis of 1943 had been brought about, he told them,
by sabotage and treachery by the French in North Africa and the
Italians following the overthrow of Mussolini. But the greatest crisis
in German history had been triumphantly mastered. However hard
the fighting in the east had been, ‘Bolshevism has not achieved its
goal.’ He glanced at the western Allies, and at the future: ‘The
plutocratic western world can undertake its threatened attempt at a
landing where it wants: it will fail!’

Since Germany had been forced on to the defensive, experiencing
only setbacks, Hitler had not changed his tune. His stance had
become immobilized, fossilized. In his view, the military disasters
had been the consequence of betrayal, incompetence, disobedience
of orders, and, above all, weakness. He conceded not a single error
or misjudgement on his own part. No capitulation; no surrender; no
retreat; no repeat of 1918; hold out at all costs, whatever the odds:
this was the unchanging message. Alongside this went the belief —
unshakeable (apart, perhaps, from his innermost thoughts and bouts
of depression during sleepless nights) but an item of blind faith, not

resting on reason — that the strength to hold out would eventually
lead to a turning of the tide, and to Germany’s final victory. In
public, he expressed his unfounded optimism through references to
the grace of Providence. As he put it to his soldiers on 1 January
1944, after overcoming the defensive period then returning to the
attack to impose devastating blows on the enemy, ‘Providence will
bestow victory on the people that has done most to earn it.’ His
instinctive belief in reward for the strongest remained intact. ‘If,
therefore, Providence grants life as the prize to those who have
fought and defended the most courageously, then our people will
find mercy from the just arbiter who at all times gave victory to the
most meritorious.’

However hollow such sentiments sounded to men at the various
fronts, suffering untold hardships, enduring hourly danger, often
realizing they would never see their loved ones again, they were,
for Hitler himself, far from mere cynical propaganda. He had to
believe these ideas — and did, certainly down to the summer of
1944, if not longer. The references, in public and private, to
‘Providence’ and ‘Fate’ increased as his own control over the course
of the war declined. The views on the course of the war which he
expressed to his generals, to other Nazi leaders, and to his
immediate entourage gave no inkling that his own resolve was
wavering, or that he had become in any way resigned to the
prospect of defeat. If it was an act, then it was one brilliantly
sustained, and remained substantially unchanged whatever the
context or personnel involved. ‘It is impressive, with what certainty
the Fithrer believes in his mission,’ noted Goebbels in his diary in
early June 1944. Others who saw Hitler frequently, in close
proximity, and were less impressionable than Goebbels, thought the
same. Without the inner conviction, Hitler would have been unable
to sway those around him, as he continued so often to do, to find
new resolve. Without it, he would not have engaged so fanatically
in bitter conflicts with his military leaders. Without it, he would
have been incapable, not least, of sustaining in himself the capacity
to continue, despite increasingly overwhelming odds.

The astonishing optimism did not give way, despite the mounting
crises and calamities of the first half of 1944. But the self-deception
involved was colossal. Hitler lived increasingly in a world of
illusion, clutching as the year wore on ever more desperately at
whatever straws he could find. The invasion, when it came, would
be repulsed without doubt, he thought. He placed enormous hopes,
too, in the devastating effect of the ‘wonder-weapons’. When they
failed to match expectations, he would remain convinced that the
alliance against him was fragile and would soon fall apart, as had
occurred in the Seven Years War two centuries earlier following the
indomitable defence of one of his heroes, Frederick the Great. Even
at the very end of a catastrophic year for Germany, he would not
give up hope of this happening. He would still be hoping for
miracles.

He had, however, no rational ways out of the inevitable
catastrophe to offer those who, in better times, had lavished their
adulation upon him. Albert Speer, in a pen-picture drawn
immediately after the war, saw Hitler’s earlier ‘genius’ at finding
‘elegant’ ways out of crises eroded by relentless overwork imposed
on him by war’s demands, undermining the intuition which had
required the more spacious and leisured life-style suited to an
artistic temperament. The change in work-patterns — turning
himself, against his natural temperament, into an obsessive
workaholic, preoccupied by detail, unable to relax, surrounded by
an unchanging and uninspiring entourage — had brought in its train,
thought Speer, enormous mental strain together with increased
inflexibility and obstinacy in decisions which had closed off all but
the route to disaster.

It was certainly the case that Hitler’s entire existence had been
consumed by the prosecution of the war. The leisured times of the
pre-war years were gone. The impatience with detail, detachment
from day-today issues, preoccupation with grandiose architectural
schemes, generous allocation of time for relaxation, listening to
music, watching films, indulging in the indolence which had been a
characteristic since his youth, had indeed given way to a punishing

work-schedule in which Hitler brooded incessantly over the most
detailed matters of military tactics, leaving little or no space for
anything unconnected with the conduct of war in a routine
essentially unchanged day in and day out. Nights with little sleep;
rising late in the mornings; lengthy midday and early evening
conferences, often extremely stressful, with his military leaders; a
strict, spartan diet, and meals often taken alone in his room; no
exercise beyond a brief daily walk with his Alsatian bitch, Blondi;
the same surrounds, the same entourage; late-night monologues to
try to wind down (at the expense of his bored entourage),
reminiscing about his youth, the First World War, and the ‘good old
times’ of the Nazi Party’s rise to power; then, finally, another
attempt to find sleep: such a routine — only marginally more relaxed
when he was at the Berghof — could not but be in the long run
harmful to health and was scarcely conducive to calm and
considered, rational reflection.

All who saw him pointed out how Hitler had aged during the
war. He had once appeared vigorous, full of energy, to those around
him. Now, his hair was greying fast, his eyes were bloodshot, he
walked with a stoop, he had difficulty controlling a trembling left
arm; for a man in his mid-fifties, he looked old. His health had
started to suffer notably from 1941 onwards. The increased numbers
of pills and injections provided every day by Dr Morell — ninety
varieties in all during the war and twenty-eight different pills each
day — could not prevent the physical deterioration.

By 1944, Hitler was a sick man - at times during the year
extremely unwell. Cardiograms, the first taken in 1941, had
revealed a worsening heart condition. And beyond the chronic
stomach and intestinal problems that had increasingly come to
plague him, Hitler had since 1942 developed symptoms, becoming
more pronounced in 1944, which point with some medical certainty
to the onset of Parkinson’s Syndrome. Most notably, an
uncontrollable trembling of the left arm, jerking in his left leg, and
a shuffling gait, were unmistakable to those who saw him at close
quarters. But although the strains of the last phase of the war took

their toll on him, there is no convincing evidence that Hitler’s
mental capacity was impaired. His rages and violent mood-swings
were inbuilt features of his character, their frequency in the final
phase of the war a reflection of the stress from the rapidly
deteriorating military conditions and his own inability to change
them, bringing, as usual, wild lashings at his generals and any
others on whom he could lay the blame that properly began at his
own door.

In looking to the loss of ‘genius’ through pressures of overwork
inappropriate to Hitler’s alleged natural talent for improvisation,
Speer was offering a naive and misleading explanation of Germany’s
fate, ultimately personalizing it in the ‘demonic’ figure of Hitler.
The adoption of such a harmfully over-burdensome style of working
was no chance development. It was the direct outcome of an
extreme form of personalized rule which had already by the time
war began seriously eroded the more formal and regular structures
of government and military command that are essential in modern
states. The reins of power were entirely held in Hitler’s hands. He
was still backed by major power bases. None existed — whatever the
growing anxieties among the military, some leading industrialists,
and a number of senior figures in the state bureaucracy about the
road down which he was taking them — that could bypass the
Fuhrer. All vital measures, both in military and in domestic affairs,
needed his authorization. There were no overriding coordinating
bodies — no war cabinet, no politburo. But Hitler, forced entirely on
to the defensive in running the war, was now often almost
paralysed in his thinking, and often in his actions. And in matters
relating to the ‘home front’, while refusing to concede an inch of his
authority he was, as Goebbels interminably bemoaned, nevertheless
incapable of more than sporadic, unsystematic interventions or
prevaricating inaction.

Far more gifted individuals than Hitler would have been
overstretched and incapable of coping with the scale and nature of
the administrative problems involved in the conduct of a world war.
Hitler’s triumphs in foreign policy in the 1930s, then as war leader

until 1941, had not arisen from his ‘artistic genius’ (as Speer saw it),
but in the main from his unerring skill in exploiting the weaknesses
and divisions of his opponents, and through the timing of actions
carried out at breakneck speed. Not ‘artistic genius’, but the
gambler’s instinct when playing for high stakes with a good hand
against weak opponents had served Hitler well in those earlier
times. Those aggressive instincts worked as long as the initiative
could be retained. But once the gamble had failed, and he was
playing a losing hand in a long-drawn-out match with the odds
becoming increasingly more hopeless, the instincts lost their
effectiveness. Hitler’s individual characteristics now fatefully
merged, in conditions of mounting disaster, into the structural
weaknesses of the dictatorship. His ever-increasing distrust of those
around him, especially his generals, was one side of the coin. The
other was his unbounded egomania, which cholerically expressed
itself — all the more pronounced as disasters started to accumulate —
in the belief that no one else was competent or trustworthy, and
that he alone could ensure victory. His takeover of the operational
command of the army in the winter crisis of 1941 had been the
most obvious manifestation of this disastrous syndrome.

Speer’s explanation was even more deficient in ignoring the fact
that Germany’s catastrophic situation in 1944 was the direct
consequence of the steps which Hitler - overwhelmingly supported
by the most powerful forces within the country, and widely
acclaimed by the masses — had taken in the years when his ‘genius’
(in Speer’s perception) had been less constrained. Not changes in his
work-style, but the direct result of a war he — and much of the
military leadership — had wanted meant that Hitler could find no
‘elegant’ solution to the stranglehold increasingly imposed by the
mighty coalition which German aggression had called into being. He
was left, therefore, with no choice but to face the reality that the
war was lost, or to hold fast to illusions.

Ever fewer Germans shared Hitler’s undiminished fatalism about
the outcome of the war. The Dictator’s rhetoric, so powerful in
‘sunnier’ periods, had lost its ability to sway the masses. Either they

believed what he said; or they believed their own eyes and ears —
gazing out over devastated cities, reading the ever-longer lists of
fallen soldiers in the death-columns of the newspapers, hearing the
sombre radio announcements (however they were dressed up) of
further Soviet advances, seeing no sign that the fortunes of war
were turning. Hitler sensed that he had lost the confidence of his
people. The great orator no longer had his audience. With no
triumphs to proclaim, he did not even want to speak to the German
people any longer. The bonds between the Fithrer and the people
had been a vital basis of the regime in earlier times. But now, the
gulf between ruler and ruled had widened to a chasm.

During 1944 Hitler would distance himself from the German
people still further than he had done in the previous two years. He
was physically detached — cocooned for the most part in his field
headquarters in East Prussia or in his mountain idyll in Bavaria —
and scarcely now visible, even in newsreels, for ordinary Germans.

On not a single occasion during 1944 did he appear in public to
deliver a speech. When, on 24 February, the anniversary of the
proclamation of the Party Programme of 1920, he spoke in the
Hofbrauhaus in Munich to the closed circle of the party’s ‘Old
Guard’, he expressly refused Goebbels’s exhortations to have the
speech broadcast and no mention was made of the speech in the
newspapers. Twice, on 30 January 1944 and early on 21 July, he
addressed the nation on the radio. Otherwise the German people did
not hear directly from their Leader throughout 1944. Even his
traditional address to the ‘Old Fighters’ of the party on 8 November
was read out by Himmler. For the masses, Hitler had become a
largely invisible leader. He was out of sight and for most, probably,
increasingly out of mind — except as an obstacle to the ending of the
war.

The intensified level of repression during the last years of the
war, along with the negative unity forged by fear of the victory of
Bolshevism, went a long way towards ensuring that the threat of
internal revolt, as had happened in 1918, never materialized. But,
for all the continuing (and in some ways astonishing) reserves of

strength of the Fiihrer cult among outright Nazi supporters, Hitler
had become for the overwhelming majority of Germans the chief
hindrance to the ending of the war. Ordinary people might prefer,
as they were reported to be saying, ‘an end with horror’ to ‘a horror
without end’. But they had no obvious way of altering their fate.
Only those who moved in the corridors of power had any possibility
of removing Hitler. Some groups of officers, through conspiratorial
links with certain highly-placed civil servants, were plotting
precisely that. After a number of abortive attempts, their strike
would come in July 1944. It would prove the last chance the
Germans themselves had to put an end to the Nazi regime. The
bitter rivalries of the subordinate leaders, the absence of any
centralized forum (equivalent to the Fascist Grand Council in Italy)
from which an internal coup could be launched, the shapelessness of
the structures of Nazi rule yet the indispensability of Hitler’s
authority to every facet of that rule, and, not least, the fact that the
regime’s leaders had burnt their boats with the Dictator in the
regime’s genocide and other untold acts of inhumanity, ruled out
any further possibility of overthrow. With that, the regime had only
its own collective suicide in an inexorably lost war to contemplate.
But like a mortally wounded wild beast at bay, it fought with the
ferocity and ruthlessness that came from desperation. And its
Leader, losing touch ever more with reality, hoping for miracles,
kept tilting at windmills — ready in Wagnerian style in the event of
ultimate apocalyptic catastrophe, and in line with his undiluted
social-Darwinistic beliefs, to take his people down in flames with
him if it proved incapable of producing the victory he had
demanded.

Readiness for the invasion in the west, certain to come within the
next few months, was the overriding preoccupation of Hitler and his
military advisers in early 1944. They were sure that the critical
phase directly following the invasion would decide the outcome of

the war. Hopes were invested in the fortifications swiftly being
erected along the Atlantic coast in France, and in the new, powerful
weapons of destruction that were under preparation and would help
the Wehrmacht to inflict a resounding defeat on the invaders as
soon as they set foot on continental soil. Forced back, with Britain
reeling under devastating blows from weapons of untold might,
against which there was no defence, the western Allies would
realize that Germany could not be defeated; the ‘unnatural’ alliance
with the Soviet Union would split apart; and, freed of the danger in
the west, the German Reich could devote all its energies, perhaps
now even with British and American backing following a separate
peace agreement, to the task of repelling and defeating Bolshevism.
So ran the optimistic currents of thought in Hitler’s headquarters.

Meanwhile, developments on the eastern front — the key theatre
of the war — were more than worrying enough to hold Hitler’s
attention. A new Soviet offensive in the south of the eastern front
had begun on 24 December 1943, making rapid advances, and
dampening an already dismal Christmas mood in the Fuhrer
Headquarters. Hitler spent New Year’s Eve closeted in his rooms
alone with Bormann. He took part in no festivities. At least in the
company of Martin Bormann, his loyal right-hand in all party
matters, he was ‘among his own’. In his daily military conferences,
it was different. The tensions with his generals were palpable. Some
loyalists around Hitler, such as Jodl, shared in some measure his
optimism. Others were already more sceptical. According to Hitler’s
Luftwaffe adjutant, Nicolaus von Below, even the initially starry-
eyed Chief of the Army General Staff Kurt Zeitzler by now did not
believe a word Hitler said. What Hitler really felt about the war,
whether he harboured private doubts that conflicted with the
optimism he voiced at all times, was even for those regularly in his
close company impossible to deduce.

Whatever his innermost thoughts, his outward stance was
predictable. Retreat, whatever the tactical necessity or even
advantage to be gained from it, was ruled out. When the retreat
then inevitably did eventually take place, it was invariably under

less favourable conditions than at the time that it had been initially
proposed. ‘Will’ to hold out was, as always, the supreme value for
Hitler. What was, in fact, required was greater military skill and
tactical flexibility than the Commander-in-Chief of the Army himself
could muster. In these circumstances, Hitler’s obstinacy and
interference in tactical matters posed ever greater difficulties for his
field commanders.

Manstein encountered Hitler’s inflexibility again when he flew on
4 January 1944 to Fuhrer Headquarters to report on the rapidly
deteriorating situation of Army Group South. Soviet forces, centred
on the Dnieper bend, had made major advances. These now posed
an ominous threat to the survival of the 4th Panzer Army (located
in the region between Vinnitsa and Berichev). The breach of this
position would open up a massive gap between Army Groups South
and Centre, putting therefore the entire southern front in mortal
peril. It demanded, in Manstein’s view, the urgent transfer of forces
northwards to counter the threat. This could only be done by
evacuating the Dnieper bend, abandoning Nikopol (with its
manganese supplies) and the Crimea, and drastically reducing the
front to a length which could more easily be defended. Hitler
refused point-blank to countenance such a proposal. Losing the
Crimea, he argued, would prompt Turkey’s abandonment of
neutrality and the defection of Bulgaria and Romania.
Reinforcements for the threatened northern wing could not be
drawn from Army Group North, since that could well lead to the
defection of Finland, loss of the Baltic, and lack of availability of
vital Swedish ore. Forces could not be drawn from the west before
the invasion had been repelled. ‘There were so many disagreements
on the enemy side,’ Manstein recalled Hitler stating, ‘that the
coalition was bound to fall apart one day. To gain time was
therefore a matter of paramount importance.’ Manstein would
simply have to hold out until reinforcements were available.

When the military conference was over, Manstein asked to see
Hitler privately, in the company only of Zeitzler. Reluctantly (as
usual when unsure of what was coming), Hitler agreed. Once the

room had emptied, Manstein began. Hitler’s demeanour, already
cold, soon touched freezing-point. His eyes bored like gimlets into
the field-marshal as Manstein stated that enemy superiority alone
was not responsible for the plight of the army in the east, but that
this was ‘also due to the way in which we are led’. Manstein,
persevering undaunted despite the intimidating atmosphere,
renewed the request he had put on two earlier occasions, that he
himself should be appointed overall Commander-in-Chief for the
eastern front with full independence of action within overall
strategic objectives, in the way that Rundstedt in the west and
Kesselring in Italy enjoyed similar authority. This would have
meant the effective surrender by Hitler of his powers of command
in the eastern theatre. He was having none of it. But his argument
backfired. ‘Even I cannot get the field-marshals to obey me!’ he
retorted. ‘Do you imagine, for example, that they would obey you
any more readily?’ Manstein replied that his orders were never
disobeyed. At this, Hitler, his anger under control though the
insubordination plainly registered, closed the discussion. Manstein
had had the last word. But he returned to his headquarters empty-
handed.

Not only had he no prospect of appointment as Commander-in-
Chief in the eastern theatre; Manstein’s outspoken views were by
now prompting doubts in Hitler’s mind about his suitability in
command of Army Group South. Meanwhile, Hitler’s orders for
Manstein’s troops were clear: there was to be no pulling back.
Tenacious German defiance in the Dnieper bend and at Nikopol did
in fact succeed in holding up the Soviet advance for the time being.
But the loss of this territory, and of the Crimea itself, was a
foregone conclusion, merely temporarily delayed.

Guderian, another of Hitler’s one-time favourite commanders,
fared no better than Manstein when he attempted, at a private
audience in January, to persuade Hitler to simplify and unify
military command by appointing a trusted general to a new position
of Chief of the Wehrmacht General Staff. This, aimed at removing
the damaging weakness at the heart of the Wehrmacht High

Command, would have meant the dismissal of Keitel. Hitler rejected
this out of hand. It would also have signified, as Hitler had no
difficulty in recognizing, a diminution of his own powers within the
military command. Like Manstein, Guderian had met an immovable
obstacle. Like Manstein’s, his recommendations of tactical retreats
fell on stony ground.

The level to which relations between Hitler and his senior
generals — among them those who had been his most loyal and
trusted commanders — had sunk was revealed by a flashpoint at the
lengthy speech Hitler gave to 100 or so of his military leaders on 27
January. After a simple lunch, during which the atmosphere was
noticeably cool, Hitler offered little more (following the usual long-
winded resort to the lessons of history, emphasis on ‘struggle’ as a
natural law, and description of his own political awakening and
build-up of the party) than an exhortation to hold out. For this,
indoctrination in the spirit of National Socialism was vital. Of one
thing, he told them, they could be certain: ‘that there could never
be even the slightest thought of capitulation, whatever might
happen’. Hitler spoke of his right to demand of his generals not
simply loyalty, but fanatical support. Full of pathos, he declared: ‘In
the last instance, if I should ever be deserted as supreme Leader, I
must have as the last defence around me the entire officer corps
who must stand with drawn swords rallied round me.’ A minor
sensation then occurred: Hitler was interrupted — something which
had never happened since the beerhalls of Munich — as Field-
Marshal von Manstein exclaimed: ‘And so it will be, my Fuhrer.’
Hitler was visibly taken aback, and lost the thread of what he was
saying. He stared icily, uttered ‘That’s good. If that’s the case, we
can never lose this war, never, come what may. For the nation will
then go into the war with the strength that is necessary. I note that
very gladly, Field-Marshal von Manstein!’ He quickly recovered,
emphasizing the need, even so, for greater advances in the
‘education’ of the officer corps. In a literal sense, Manstein’s words
could be seen to be not only harmless, but encouraging. But, as
Manstein himself indicated after the war, the implied meaning was

more critical of Hitler. The interruption, the field-marshal later
recalled, arose from a rush of blood as he sensed that Hitler had
impugned the honour of himself and his fellow officers by implying
that their loyalty might be in question.

Hitler, for his part, saw in the interruption a reproach for his
mistrust of his generals. The meeting with Manstein three weeks
earlier still rankled with him, as did a frank letter which the field-
marshal had subsequently sent. Within minutes of the interruption,
Hitler had summoned Manstein to his presence. With Keitel in
attendance, Hitler forbade Manstein to interrupt in future. ‘You
yourself would not tolerate such behaviour from your own
subordinates,’ he stated, adding, in a gratuitous insult, that
Manstein’s letter to him a few days earlier had presumably been to
justify himself to posterity in his war diary. Needled at this,
Manstein retorted: ‘You must excuse me if I use an English
expression in this connection, but all I can say to your interpretation
of my motives is that I am a gentleman.’ On this discordant note,
the audience came to a close. Manstein’s days were plainly
numbered.

At noon three days later, the eleventh anniversary of the
takeover of power, Hitler addressed the German people, confining
himself to a relatively short radio address from his headquarters. As
his voice crackled through the ether from the Wolf ’s Lair in East
Prussia, the wailing sirens in Berlin announced the onset of another
massive air-attack on the city. Symbolically — it might seem in
retrospect — the Sportpalast, scene of many Nazi triumphs in the
‘time of struggle’ before 1933, and where so often since then tens of
thousands of the party faithful had gathered to hear Hitler’s big
speeches, was gutted that night in a hail of incendiaries.

Hitler’s radio broadcast could offer listeners nothing of what they
yearned to hear: when the war would be over, when the devastation
from the air would be ended. Instead, what they heard was no more
than a rant (along the usual lines, accompanied by the normal
savage vocabulary of ‘Jewish bacteria’) about the threat of
Bolshevism. Not a word was said in consolation to those who had

lost loved ones at the front, or about the human misery caused by
the bomb-raids. Even Goebbels acknowledged that, in bypassing
practically all the issues that preoccupied ordinary people, the
speech had failed to make an impact. It was a remarkable contrast
with earlier years. His propaganda slogans were now falling on deaf
ears. Indirectly, judgement on the speech could be read into
reported remarks such as the comment of a Berlin worker, that only
‘an idiot can tell me the war will be won’.

Ill

Scepticism both about the capabilities of German air-defence to
protect cities against the menace from the skies, and about the
potential for launching retaliatory attacks on Britain, was well
justified. Goring’s earlier popularity had long since evaporated
totally among the mass of the public, as his once much-vaunted
Luftwaffe had shown itself utterly incapable of preventing the
destruction of German towns and cities. Nor did the latest wave of
raids, particularly the severe attack on Berlin, do much to improve
the Reich Marshal’s standing at Fuhrer Headquarters. It took little
to prompt Hitler to withering tirades against Goring’s competence
as Luftwaffe chief. In particular, Goebbels, who both as Gauleiter of
Berlin and with new responsibilities for coordinating measures for
civil defence in the air-war possibly had more first-hand experience
than any other Nazi leader of the impact of the Allied bombing of
German cities, lost no opportunity whenever he met Hitler to vent
his spleen on Gooring. But however violently he condemned what
Goebbels described as ‘Goring’s total fiasco’ in air-defence, Hitler
would not consider parting company with one of his longest-serving
paladins. Hitler ‘could do nothing about Goring because the
authority of the Reich or the party would thereby suffer the greatest
damage’. It would remain Hitler’s position throughout the year.

A big hope of making a dent in Allied air superiority rested on
the production of the jet-fighter, the Me262, which had been
commissioned the previous May. Its speed of up to 800 kilometres

per hour meant that it was capable of outflying any enemy aircraft.
But when the aircraft designer Professor Willy Messerschmitt had
told Hitler of its disproportionately heavy fuel consumption, it had
led by September 1943 to its production priority being removed.
This was restored only a vital quarter of a year later, on 7 January
1944, when Speer and Milch were summoned to Hitler’s
headquarters to be told, on the basis of English press reports, that
British testing of jet-planes was almost complete. Hitler now
demanded production on the Me262 to be stepped up immediately.
But valuable time had been lost. It was plain that the first machines
would take months to produce. Whether Hitler was as clearly
informed of this as Speer later claimed is questionable.

Hitler’s instincts, as always, veered towards attack as the best
form of defence. He looked to the chance to launch devastating
weapons of destruction against Great Britain, giving the British a
taste of their own medicine and forcing the Allies to rethink their
strategy in the air-war. Here, too, his illusions about the speed with
which the ‘wonder-weapons’ could be made ready for deployment,
and their likely impact on British war strategy, were shored up by
the optimistic prognoses of his advisers.

Speer had persuaded Hitler as long ago as October 1942, after
witnessing trials at Peenemtinde earlier in the year, of the
destructive potential of a long-range rocket, the A4 (later better
known as the V2), able to enter the stratosphere en route to
delivering its unstoppable devastation on England. Hitler had
immediately ordered their mass-production on a huge scale. It was,
he told Speer, ‘the decisive weapon of the war’, which would lift the
burden on Germany when unleashed on the British. Production was
to be advanced with all speed — if need be at the expense of tank
production. In February 1944, Speer was still indicating to Goebbels
that the rocket programme could be ready by the end of April. In
the event, it would be September before the rockets were launched.

The alternative project of the Luftwaffe, the ‘Kirschkern’
programme, which produced what came to be known as the V1
flying-bombs, was more advanced. This, too, went back to 1942.

And, like the A4 project, hopes of it were high and expectations of
its production-rate optimistic. Production began in January 1944.
Tests were highly encouraging. Speer told Goebbels in early
February it would be ready at the beginning of April. Milch pictured
for Hitler, a month later, total devastation in London in a wave of
1,500 flying-bombs over ten days, beginning on Hitler’s birthday,
20 April, with the remainder to be dispatched the following month.
Within three weeks of exposure to such bombing, he imagined,
Britain would be on its knees. Given the information he was being
fed, Hitler’s illusions become rather more explicable. Competition,
in this case between the army’s A4 project and the ‘Kirschkern’
programme of the Luftwaffe, played its part. And ‘working towards
the Ftihrer’, striving — as the key to retaining power and position —
to accomplish what it was known he would favour, to provide the
miracle he wanted, and to accommodate his wishes, however
unrealistic, still applied. Reluctance to convey bad or depressing
news to him was the opposite side of the same coin. Together, the
consequence was inbuilt, systemic over-optimism — shoring up
unrealizable hopes, inevitably leading to sour disillusionment.

During February, Hitler, perusing the international press
summarized for him as usual in the overview provided by his Press
Chief Otto Dietrich, had seen a press notice from Stockholm stating
that a general staff officer of the army had been designated to shoot
him. SS-Standartenftihrer Johann Rattenhuber, responsible for
Hitler’s personal safety, was instructed to tighten security at the
Wolf ’s Lair. All visitors were to be carefully screened; not least,
briefcases were to be thoroughly searched. Hitler had reservations,
however, about drawing security precautions too tightly. In any
case, within days the matter lost its urgency since he decided to
leave the Wolf ’s Lair and move to the Berghof. The recent air-raids
on Berlin and increasing Allied air-supremacy meant that the
prospect of a raid on Fuhrer Headquarters could no longer be ruled

out. It was essential, therefore, to strengthen the walls and roofs of
the buildings. While workers from the Organisation Todt were
carrying out the extensive work, headquarters would be transferred
to Berchtesgaden. On the evening of 22 February, having
announced that he would be speaking to the ‘Old Guard’ in Munich
on the 24th at the annual celebration of the announcement of the
Party Programme in 1920, he left the Wolf ’s Lair in his special
train and headed south. He would not return from the Berghof until
mid-July.

He had been unwell in the middle of the month. His intestinal
problems were accompanied by a severe cold. The trembling in his
left leg was noticeable. He also complained of blurred vision in his
right eye, diagnosed a fortnight later by an ophthalmic specialist as
caused by minute blood-vessel haemhorraging. His health problems
were by now chronic, and mounting. But he was a good deal better
by the time he arrived on 24 February in one of his old haunts,
Munich’s Hofbrauhaus, to deliver his big speech to a large gathering
of fervent loyalists. In this company, Hitler was in his element. His
good speaking-form returned. The old certitudes sufficed. He
believed, the assembled fanatics heard, more firmly than ever in the
victory that toughness in holding out would bring; retaliation was
on its way in massive attacks on London; the Allied invasion, when
it came, would be swiftly repelled. The Jews of England and
America — held as always to blame for the war - could expect what
had already happened to the Jews of Germany. It was a crude
attack on the prime Nazi ideological target as compensation for the
lack of any tangible military success. But it was exactly what this
audience wanted to hear. They loved it.

At the beginning of March, Hitler summoned Goebbels to the
Berghof. The immediate reason was the prospect of the imminent
defection of Finland. In fact, for the time being this proved a false
alarm. Finland would eventually secede only six months later. But
the meeting with Goebbels on 3 March was, as usual, not confined
to a specific issue, and prompted another tour d’horizon by Hitler,
allowing a glimpse into his thinking at this juncture.

He told Goebbels that, in the light of the Finnish crisis, he was
now determined to put an end to the continued ‘treachery’ in
Hungary. It would be dealt with as soon as possible. On the military
situation, Hitler exuded confidence. He thought a shortened front in
the east could be held. He wanted to turn to the offensive again in
the summer. On the invasion to be expected in all probability
during the subsequent months, Hitler was ‘absolutely certain’ of
Germany’s chances. He outlined the strength of forces to repel it,
emphasizing especially the quality of the SS-divisions that had been
sent there. Even in the air, Hitler reckoned Germany would be able
to hold its own. It was rare for Goebbels to offer any hint of
criticism of Hitler in his diary entries. But on this occasion the
optimism seemed unfounded, even to the Propaganda Minister, who
noted: ‘I wish these prognoses of the Fihrer were right. We’ve been
so often disappointed recently that you feel some scepticism rising
up within you.’

Hitler also expected a great deal from the ‘retaliation’, which he
envisaged being launched in massive style in the second half of
April, and from the new fire-power and radar being built into
German fighters. He thought the back of the enemy’s air-raids
would be broken by the following winter, after which Germany
could then ‘again be active in the attack on England’. Hitler needed
little invitation to pour out his bile on his generals. It was easier for
Stalin, he commented. He had had shot the sort of generals who
were causing problems in Germany. But as regards the ‘Jewish
question’, Germany was benefiting from its radical policy: ‘the Jews
can do us no more harm.’

Within just over two weeks of Hitler’s talk with Goebbels,
Hungary had been invaded — the last German invasion of the war.
German intelligence had learned that the Hungarians had attempted
to make diplomatic overtures both to the western Allies and to the
Soviet Union.

From Hitler’s point of view, in full concurrence with the opinion
of his military leaders, it was high time to act. Thinking he was
coming to discuss, in particular, troop withdrawals from the eastern

front, the seventy-five-year-old Hungarian head of state, Admiral
Horthy, arrived at Klessheim, together with his foreign minister,
war minister, and chief of general staff, on the morning of 18
March. He had walked into a trap.

Hitler at the outset accused the Hungarian government of
negotiating with the Allies in an attempt to take Hungary out of the
war. Holding fast, as ever, to his notion that the Jews were behind
the war, and that, consequently, the continued existence of Jews in
any country provided, in effect, a fifth-column subverting and
endangering the war-effort, Hitler was especially aggressive in
accusing Horthy of allowing almost a million Jews to exist without
any hindrance, which had to be seen from the German side as a
threat to the eastern and Balkan fronts. Consequently, the German
leadership, continued Hitler, had justifiable fears of a defection
taking place, similar to that which had happened in Italy. He had,
therefore, decided upon the military occupation of Hungary, and
demanded Horthy’s agreement to this in a signed joint declaration.
Horthy refused to sign. The temperature in the meeting rose. Hitler
declared that if Horthy did not sign, the occupation would simply
take place without his approval. Any armed resistance would be
crushed by Croatian, Slovakian, and Romanian as well as German
troops. Horthy threatened to resign. Hitler said that in such an
event he could not guarantee the safety of the Admiral’s family. At
this base blackmail, Horthy sprang to his feet, protesting: ‘If
everything here is already decided, there’s no point in staying any
longer. ’'m leaving immediately,’ and stormed out of the room.

While Horthy was demanding to be taken to his special train, and
Ribbentrop was berating Dome Sztojay, the Hungarian Ambassador
in Berlin, an air-raid alarm sounded. In fact, the ‘air-raid’ was
merely a ruse, complete with smoke-screen covering of the palace
at Klessheim and alleged severance of telephone links with
Budapest. This elaborate deceit was used to persuade Horthy to put
aside thoughts of a premature departure and compel him to enter
into renewed talks with Hitler. The browbeating and chicanery, as
usual, did the trick. When Horthy returned to his train that evening,

it was in the accompaniment of Security Police chief Ernst
Kaltenbrunner and Ribbentrop’s emissary in Hungary, Edmund
Veesenmeyer, endowed with plenipotentiary powers to ensure that
German interests were served. And this was only once Horthy had
finally agreed to install a puppet regime, with Sztojay as prime
minister, ready to do German bidding.

Next day, 19 March 1944, Hungary was in German hands. Not
only could extra raw materials and manpower immediately be
exploited for the German war effort; but, as Hitler had told
Goebbels a fortnight earlier, the ‘Jewish question’ could now be
tackled in Hungary.

With the German takeover in Budapest, Hungary’s large and still
intact Jewish community — some 750,000 persons — was doomed.
The new masters of Hungary did not lose a minute. Eichmann’s men
entered Budapest with the German troops. Within days, 2,000 Jews
had been rounded up. The first deportation — a train with over
3,000 Jewish men, women, and children packed in indescribable
conditions into about forty cattle-wagons — left for Auschwitz a
month later. By early June, ninety-two trains had carried almost
300,000 Hungarian Jews to their deaths. When Horthy halted the
deportations a month later, triggering the events that would lead to
his own deposition, 437,402 Hungarian Jews had been sent to the
gas-chambers.

On the day that German troops entered Hungary, a strange little
ceremony took place at the Berghof. The field-marshals, who had
been summoned from different parts of the front, witnessed the
presentation to Hitler by their senior, Rundstedt, of a declaration of
their loyalty, which they had all signed. The signatures had all been
collected, on a tour of the front, by Hitler’s chief Wehrmacht
adjutant, General Schmundt. The idea, characteristically, had come
from Goebbels (though this was kept quiet, and not made known to
Hitler). It had been prompted by the anti-German subversive

propaganda disseminated from Moscow by the captured General
Walter von Seydlitz-Kurzbach and other officers who had fallen into
Soviet hands at Stalingrad. In reality, the effect of the Seydlitz
propaganda was minimal. But these were nervous times for the Nazi
leadership. Schmundt’s main intention, in any case, was to remove
Hitler’s distrust towards his generals, and to improve the icy
relations which had been so much in evidence at the January
meeting interrupted by Manstein. It was, nevertheless, both
remarkable in itself and a clear sign that all was not well if, in the
midst of such a titanic conflict, the senior military leaders should
see fit to produce a signed declaration of loyalty to their supreme
commander and head of state. Manstein, the last field-marshal to
sign the document, certainly thought so. He felt the declaration to
be quite superfluous from a soldier’s point of view. Hitler seemed
moved by the occasion. It was a rare moment of harmony in his
dealings with his generals.

Normality was, however, soon to be resumed. Within a week,
Manstein was back at the Berghof. The 1st Panzer Army, under
General Hans Valentin Hube, was in imminent danger of
encirclement by Soviet troops who had broken through from
Tarnopol to the Dniester. Manstein insisted (against Hube’s
recommendation that his army seek safety by retreating to the
south over the Dniester) on a breakthrough to the west, in order to
build a new front in Galicia. For this, reinforcements to assist the
1st Panzer Army would be necessary. And for these to be provided
from some other part of the front, Hitler’s agreement was
necessary. Sharp exchanges took place between Manstein and Hitler
at the midday military conference. But Hitler refused to concede to
Manstein’s request, and held the field-marshal personally
responsible for the unfavourable position of his Army Group.
Further deliberation was adjourned until the evening. Disgusted,
Manstein told Schmundt that he wished to resign his command if his
orders did not gain Hitler’s approval.

When discussion continued at the evening conference, however,
Hitler had, astonishingly, changed his mind. Who or what had

persuaded him to do so, or whether he had simply brooded on the
matter before altering his decision, is unclear. At any rate, he now
offered Manstein the reinforcements he wanted, including an SS
Panzer Corps to be taken away from the western front. Manstein
went away momentarily satisfied. But Hitler resented having
concessions wrung from him — particularly after his initial refusal in
front of a sizeable audience. And, from Hitler’s point of view,
Manstein had in previous weeks been both troublesome and
ineffectual in command. Hitler’s way of dealing with major military
setbacks was invariably (apart from his kid-glove treatment of his
old political ally, Goring, as Luftwaffe chief despite the disasters in
the air-war) to blame the commander and to look for a replacement
who would fire the fighting morale of the troops and shore up their
will to continue. It was time for a parting of the ways with
Manstein, as it was with another senior field-marshal, Kleist, who,
two days after Manstein, had also paid a visit to the Berghof,
requesting permission for Army Group A on the Black Sea coast to
pull back from the Bug to the Dniester.

On 30 March, Manstein and Kleist were picked up in Hitler’s
Condor aircraft and taken to the Berghof. Zeitzler told Manstein
that after his last visit, Goring, Himmler, and probably Keitel had
agitated against him. Zeitzler had himself offered to resign, an offer
that had been summarily turned down. Schmundt had seen to it that
the dismissals of the two field-marshals were carried out with
decorum, not with rancour. They were replaced by Walter Model
and Ferdinand Schorner, both tough generals and favourites of
Hitler, whom he regarded as ideal for rousing the morale of the
troops and instilling rigorous National Socialist fighting spirit in
them. At the same time, the names of the army groups were altered
to Army Group North Ukraine and Army Group South Ukraine. The
Ukraine had, in fact, already been lost. The symbolic renaming was
part of the aim of reviving morale by implying that it would soon
be retaken.

It would rapidly become clear yet again, however, that changes
in personnel and nomenclature would not suffice. The new

commanders were no more able to stop the relentless Soviet
advance than Manstein and Kleist had been. On 2 April, Hitler
issued an operational order which began: “The Russian offensive on
the south of the eastern front has passed its high-point. The Russians
have used up and split up their forces. The time has come to bring
the Russian advance finally to a halt.’ It was a vain hope. A crucial
component of the new lines drawn up was the provision for the
Crimea, to be held at all cost. It was an impossibility. Odessa, the
port on the Black Sea which was vital to supply-lines for the
Crimea, had been abandoned on 10 April. By early May, the entire
Crimea was lost, with Hitler forced to agree in the night of 8-9 May
to the evacuation of Sevastopol by sea. The vain struggle to hold on
to the Crimea had cost over 60,000 German and Romanian lives.
When the Soviet spring offensive came to a halt, the Germans had
been pushed back in some sectors by as much as 600 miles inside a
year.

Goebbels had suggested to Hitler that he might speak to the
German people on 1 May. He had not been well enough to speak on
‘Heroes’ Memorial Day’ on 12 March, when Grand-Admiral Donitz —
one of the few military leaders whom Hitler greatly respected, and
evidently a coming man - substituted for him. Hitler told Goebbels
(who remarked on his nervous strain, particularly about Hungary,
over the past weeks) that he was sleeping only about three hours a
night — an exaggeration, but the long-standing problems of insomnia
had certainly worsened. He did show some apparent inclination to
give a radio address on 1 May, but claimed his health was not up to
giving a speech in public. He did not know whether he could
manage it.

It was an excuse. When, following his discussion with Goebbels,
he gave a fiery pep-talk, unprepared and without notes, to his party
leaders, there was no hint of concern about whether he might break
down part-way through his speech (in which he declared, among
other confidence-boosting claims, that the Soviet advance also had
its advantages in bringing home to all nations the seriousness of the
threat). But when speaking to the ‘Old Guard’, he was in trusted

company. A speech, in the circumstances, to a mass audience when
he was well aware of the slump in mood of the population was a
different matter altogether.

Hitler’s birthday that year, his fifty-fifth, had the usual trappings
and ceremonials. Goebbels had Berlin emblazoned with banners and
a new slogan of resounding pathos: ‘Our walls broke, but our hearts
didn’t.’ The State Opera house on Unter den Linden was festively
decorated for the usual celebration, attended by dignitaries from
state, party, and Wehrmacht. Goebbels portrayed Hitler’s historic
achievements. The Berlin Philharmonia, conducted by Hans
Knappertsbusch, played Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ Symphony. But the
mood among the Nazi faithful at such events was contrived.
Goebbels was well aware from reports from the regional
Propaganda Offices that the popular mood was ‘very critical and
sceptical’, and that ‘the depression in the broad masses’ had reached
‘worrying levels’.

A familiar face, not seen for some months, had returned to the
Berghof in mid-April. Since being admitted to the Red Cross hospital
at Hohenlychen, sixty miles north of Berlin, for a knee operation
(accompanied by severe nervous strain), Albert Speer had been out
of circulation. Hitler had seen him briefly in March, while Speer was
convalescing for a short time at Klessheim, but the armaments
minister had then left for Meran, in South Tyrol, to recover in the
company of his family.

An absent minister was an invitation, in the Third Reich, for
others thirsting for power to step into the vacuum. Karl Otto Saur,
the able head of the technical office in Speer’s ministry, had taken
the opportunity to exploit Hitler’s favour in his boss’s absence.
When a Fighter Staff had been set up in March — linking Speer’s
ministry with the Luftwaffe to speed up and coordinate production
of air-defence — Hitler placed it, against Speer’s express wishes, in
the hands of Saur. And when, stung by the near-unhampered

bombing of German cities, Hitler discovered that little progress had
been made on the building of huge underground bomb-proof
bunkers to protect fighter-production against air-raids, Speer’s other
right-hand man, Xaver Dorsch, head of the central office of the
massive construction apparatus, the Organisation Todt, spotted his
chance. Dorsch was commissioned by Hitler with the sole
responsibility for the building of the six immense bunkers within
the Reich — thereby overriding Speer — accompanied by full
authority to assure the work had top priority.

Speer had not reached his high position, however, without an
ability to take care of his own interests in the ruthless scheming and
jockeying for position that went on around Hitler. He was not
prepared to accept the undermining of his own authority without a
fight. On 19 April, he wrote a long letter to Hitler complaining at
the decisions he had taken and demanding the restoration of his
own authority over Dorsch. He let it be known that he wished to
resign should Hitler not accede to his wishes. Hitler’s initial anger at
the letter gave way to the more pragmatic consideration that he still
needed Speer’s organizational talents. He passed a message to
Speer, via Erhard Milch, Luftwaffe armaments supremo, that he still
held him in high esteem. On 24 April, Speer appeared at the
Berghof. Hitler, formally attired, gloves in hand, came out to meet
him, accompanying him like some foreign dignitary into the
imposing hall. Speer, his vanity touched, was immediately
impressed. Hitler went on to flatter Speer. He told him that he
needed him to oversee all building works. He was in agreement
with whatever Speer thought right in this area. Speer was won over.
That evening, he was back in the Berghof ‘family’, making small-
talk with Eva Braun and the others in the late-night session around
the fire. Bormann suggested listening to some music. Records of
music by Wagner, naturally, and Johann Straufs’s Fledermaus were
put on. Speer felt at home again.

In Speer’s absence, and despite the extensive damage from air-
raids, Saur had in fact masterminded a remarkable increase in
fighter-production — though with a corresponding decline in output

of bombers. Delighted as he was with better prospects of air-
defence, Hitler’s instincts lay, as always, in aggression and
regaining the initiative through bombing. The new chief of the
Luftwaffe operations staff, Karl Koller, was, therefore, pushing at an
open door when he presented Hitler with a report, in early May,
pointing out the dangerous decline in production of bombers, and
what was needed to sustain German dominance. Hitler promptly
told Goring that the low targets for bomber-production were
unacceptable. Goring passed the message to the Fighter Staff that
there was to be a trebling of bomber-production — alongside the
massive increase in fighters to come off the production lines. Eager
to please, as always, Goring had told Hitler of rapid progress in the
production of the jet, the Me262, of which the Dictator had such
high hopes.

The previous autumn, having removed top priority from
production of the Me262 because of its heavy fuel-consumption,
Hitler had changed his mind. He had been led to believe — possibly
it was a misunderstanding — by the designer, Professor Willi
Messerschmitt, that the jet, once in service, could be used not as a
fighter, but as a bomber to attack Britain and to play a decisive role
in repelling the coming invasion, wreaking havoc on the beaches as
Allied troops were disembarking. Goring, at least as unrealistic as
his Leader in his expectations, promised the jet-bombers would be
available by May. At his meeting with Speer and Milch in January,
when he demanded accelerated production of the jet, Hitler had
stated, to the horror of the Luftwaffe’s technical staff, that he
wanted to deploy it as a bomber. Arguments to the contrary were of
no avail.

Now, on 23 May, in a meeting at the Berghof with Goring, Saur,
and Milch about aircraft production, he heard mention of the Me262
as a fighter. He interrupted. He had presumed, he stated, that it was
being built as a bomber. It transpired that his instructions of the
previous autumn, unrealistic as they were, had been simply ignored.
Hitler exploded in fury, ordering the Me262 - despite all technical
objections levelled by the experts present — to be built exclusively

as a bomber. Goring lost no time in passing the brickbats down the
line to the Luftwaffe construction experts. But he had to tell Hitler
that the major redesign needed for the plane would now delay
production for five months. Whether fuel would by that time be
available for it was another matter. Heavy American air-raids on
fuel plants in central and eastern Germany on 12 May, to be
followed by even more destructive raids at the end of the month,
along with Allied attacks, carried out from bases in Italy, on the
Romanian oil-refineries near Ploesti, halved German fuel
production. Nimbly taking advantage of Goring’s latest
embarrassment, Speer had no trouble in persuading Hitler to
transfer to his ministry full control over aircraft production.

Three days after the wrangle about the Me262, another, larger,
gathering took place on the Obersalzberg. A sizeable number of
generals and other senior officers, who had been participants in
ideological training-courses and were ready to return to the front,
had been summoned to the Berghof to hear a speech by Hitler — one
of several such speeches he gave between autumn 1943 and summer
1944. They assembled on 26 May in the Platterhof, the big hotel
adjacent to the Berghof on the site of the far more modest Pension
Moritz, where Hitler had stayed in the 1920s. A central passage in
the speech touched on the ‘Final Solution’. Hitler spoke of the Jews
as a ‘foreign body’ in the German people which, though not all had
understood why he had to proceed ‘so brutally and ruthlessly’, it
had been essential to expel.

He came to the key point. ‘In removing the Jews,’ he went on, ‘I
eliminated in Germany the possibility of creating some sort of
revolutionary core or nucleus. You could naturally say: Yes, but
could you not have done it more simply — or not more simply, since
everything else would have been more complicated — but more
humanely? Gentlemen,’ he continued, ‘we are in a life-or-death
struggle. If our opponents are victorious in this struggle, the
German people would be eradicated. Bolshevism would slaughter
millions and millions and millions of our intellectuals. Anyone not
dying through a shot in the neck would be deported. The children of

the upper classes would be taken away and eliminated. This entire
bestiality has been organized by the Jews.’ He spoke of 40,000
women and children being burnt to death through the incendiaries
dropped on Hamburg, adding: ‘Don’t expect anything else from me
except the ruthless upholding of the national interest in the way
which, in my view, will have the greatest effect and benefit for the
German nation.’ At this the officers burst into loud and lasting
applause.

He continued: ‘Here just as generally, humanity would amount to
the greatest cruelty towards one’s own people. If I already incur the
Jews’ hatred, I at least don’t want to miss the advantages of such
hatred.’ Shouts of ‘quite right’ were heard from his audience. “The
advantage,’ he went on, ‘is that we possess a cleanly organized
entity with which no one can interfere. Look in contrast at other
states. We have gained insight into a state which took the opposite
route: Hungary. The entire state undermined and corroded, Jews
everywhere, even in the highest places Jews and more Jews, and
the entire state covered, I have to say, by a seamless web of agents
and spies who have desisted from striking only because they feared
that a premature strike would draw us in, though they waited for
this strike. I have intervened here too, and this problem will now
also be solved.’ He cited once again his ‘prophecy’ of 1939, that in
the event of another war not the German nation but Jewry itself
would be ‘eradicated’. The audience vigorously applauded.
Continuing, he underlined ‘one sole principle, the maintenance of
our race’. What served this principle, he said, was right; what
detracted from it, wrong. He concluded, again to storms of
applause, by speaking of the ‘mission’ of the German people in
Europe. As always, he posed stark alternatives: defeat in the war
would mean ‘the end of our people’, victory ‘the beginning of our
domination over Europe’.

Vil

Whatever nervousness was felt at the Berghof in the early days of
June about an invasion which was as good as certain to take place
within the near future, there were few, if any, signs of it on the
surface. To Hitler’s Luftwaffe adjutant, Nicolaus von Below, it
seemed almost like pre-war times on the Obersalzberg. Hitler would
take Below’s wife on one side when she was invited to lunch and
talk about the children or her parents’ farm. In the afternoon, he
would gather up his hat, his walking-stick, and his cape, and lead
the statutory walk to the Tea House for coffee and cakes. In the
evenings, around the fire he would find some relaxation in the
inconsequential chat of his guests or would hold forth, as ever, on
usual themes —- great personalities of history, the future shape of
Europe, carrying out the work of Providence in combating Jews and
Bolsheviks, the influence of the Churches, and, of course,
architectural plans, along with the usual reminiscences of earlier
years. Even the news, on 3-4 June, that the Allies had taken Rome,
with the German troops pulling back to the Apennines, was received
calmly. For all its obvious strategic importance, Italy was, for
Hitler, little more than a sideshow. He would have little longer to
wait for the main event.

Hitler seemed calm, and looked well compared with his condition
in recent months, when Goebbels accompanied him to the Tea
House on the afternoon of 5 June. Earlier, he had told the
Propaganda Minister that the plans for retaliation were now so
advanced that he would be ready to unleash 300-400 of the new
pilotless flying-bombs on London within a few days. (He had, in
fact, given the order for a major air-attack on London, including use
of these new weapons, on 16 May.) He repeated how confident he
was that the invasion, when it came, would be repulsed. Rommel,
he said, was equally confident. On 4 June Rommel, whom Hitler
had the previous autumn made responsible for the Atlantic defences,
had even left for a few days’ leave with his family near Ulm. Other
commanding officers in the west were equally unaware of the
imminence of the invasion, though reconnaissance had provided
telegraph warnings that very day of things stirring on the other side

of the Channel. Nothing of this was reported to OKW at
Berchtesgaden or, even more astonishingly, to General Friedrich
Dollmann’s 7th Army directly on the invasion front.

That evening, Hitler and his entourage viewed the latest
newsreel. The discussion moved to films and the theatre. Eva Braun
joined in with pointed criticism of some productions. ‘We sit then
around the hearth until two o’clock at night,’ wrote Goebbels,
‘exchange reminiscences, take pleasure in the many fine days and
weeks we have had together. The Ftthrer inquires about this and
that. All in all, the mood is like the good old times.’ The heavens
opened and a thunderstorm broke as Goebbels left the Berghof. It
was four hours since the first news had started to trickle in that the
invasion would begin that night. Goebbels had been disinclined to
believe the tapping into enemy communications. But coming down
the Obersalzberg to his quarters in Berchtesgaden, the news was all
too plain; ‘the decisive day of the war had begun.’

Hitler went to bed not long after Goebbels had left, probably
around 3 a.m. When Speer arrived next morning, seven hours later,
Hitler had still not been wakened with the news of the invasion. In
fact, it seems that the initial scepticism at the High Command of the
Wehrmacht that this indeed was the invasion had been finally
dispelled only a little while earlier, probably between 8.15 and 9.30
a.m. Influenced by German intelligence reports, Hitler had spoken a
good deal in previous weeks that the invasion would begin with a
decoy attack to drag German troops away from the actual landing-
place. (In fact, Allied deception through the dropping of dummy
parachutists and other diversionary tactics did contribute to initial
German confusion about the location of the landing.) His adjutants
now hesitated to waken him with mistaken information. According
to Speer, Hitler — who had earlier correctly envisaged that the
landing would be on the Normandy coast — was still suspicious at
the lunchtime military conference that it was a diversionary tactic
put across by enemy intelligence. Only then did he agree to the
already belated demand of the Commander-in-Chief in the West,
Field-Marshal von Rundstedt (who had expressed uncertainty in

telegrams earlier that morning about whether the landing was
merely a decoy), to deploy two panzer divisions held in reserve in
the Paris area against the beachhead that was rapidly being
established some 120 miles away. The delay was crucial. Had they
moved by night, the panzer divisions might have made a difference.
Their movements by day were hampered by heavy Allied air-
attacks, and they suffered severe losses of men and matériel.

At the first news of the invasion, Hitler had seemed relieved — as
if, thought Goebbels, a great burden had fallen from his shoulders.
What he had been expecting for months was now reality. It had
taken place, he said, exactly where he had predicted it. The poor
weather, he added, was on Germany’s side. He exuded confidence,
declaring that it was now possible to smash the enemy. He was
‘absolutely certain’ that the Allied troops, for whose quality he had
no high regard, would be repulsed. Goring thought the battle as
good as won. Ribbentrop was, as always, ‘entirely on the Fuhrer’s
side. He is also more than sure, without, like the Fuhrer, being able
to give reasons in detail for it’, wryly commented Goebbels — like
Jodl, one of the quiet sceptics. There were good grounds for
scepticism. In fact, the delay in reaction on the German side had
helped to ensure that by then the battle of the beaches was already
as good as lost.

The vanguard of the huge Allied armada of almost 3,000 vessels
approaching the Normandy coast had disgorged the first of its
American troops on to Utah Beach, on the Cotentin peninsula, at
6.30 a.m., meeting no notable resistance. Landings following
shortly afterwards at the British and Canadian sites — Gold, Juno,
and Sword Beaches - also went better than expected. Only the
second American landing at Omaha Beach, encountering a good
German infantry division which happened to be in a state of
readiness and behind a particularly firm stretch of fortifications, ran
into serious difficulties. Troops landing on the exposed beach were
simply mown down. The casualty rate was massive. Omaha gave a
horrifying taste of what the landings could have faced elsewhere
had the German defence been properly prepared and waiting. But

even at Omaha, after several torrid hours of terrible bloodletting,
almost 35,000 American troops were finally able to push forward
and gain a foothold on French soil. By the end of the day, around
156,000 Allied troops had landed, had forged contact with the
13,000 American and British parachutists dropped behind the flanks
of the enemy lines several hours before the landings, and been able
successfully to establish beachheads — including one sizeable stretch
some thirty kilometres long and ten deep.

What appears at times in retrospect to have been almost an
inexorable triumph of ‘Operation Overlord’ could have turned out
quite differently. Hitler’s initial optimism had not, in fact, been
altogether unfounded. He had presumed the Atlantic coast better
fortified than was the case. Even so, the advantage ought in the
decisive early stages to have lain with the defenders of the coast —
as it did at Omaha. But the dilatory action was costly in the
extreme. The divisions among the German commanders and lack of
agreement on tactics between Rommel (who favoured close
proximity of panzer divisions to the coast in the hope of
immediately crushing an invading force) and General Leo Geyr von
Schweppenburg, commander of Panzer Group West (wanting to
hold the armour back until it was plain where it should be
concentrated), had been a significant weakness in the German
planning for the invasion. Allied strategic decoys, as we noted, also
played a part in the early confusion of the German commanders on
the invasion night itself. Not least, massive Allied air-superiority —
compared with over 10,000 Allied sorties on D-Day, the Luftwaffe
could manage to put in the air only eighty fighters based in
Normandy - gave the invading forces a huge advantage in the cover
provided during the decisive early stages. Once the Allied troops
were ashore and had established their beachheads, the key question
was whether they could be reinforced better and faster than the
Germans. Here, the fire-power from the air came into its own. The
Allied planes could at one and the same time seriously hamper the
German supply-lines, and help to ensure that reinforcements kept
pouring in across the Normandy beaches. By 12 June, the five Allied

beachheads had been consolidated into a single front, and the
German defenders, if slowly, were being pushed back. Meanwhile,
American troops were already striking out across the Cotentin
peninsula. The road to the key port of Cherbourg was opening up.

Nazi leaders, for whom early optimism about repelling the
invasion had within days evaporated, retained one big hope: the
long-awaited ‘miracle weapons’. Not only Hitler thought these
would bring a change in war-fortunes. More than fifty sites had
been set up on the coast in the Pas de Calais from which the V1
flying-bombs — early cruise missiles powered by jet engines and
difficult to shoot down - could be fired off in the direction of
London. Hitler had reckoned with the devastating effect of a mass
attack on the British capital by hundreds of the new weapons being
fired simultaneously. The weapon had then been delayed by a series
of production problems. Now Hitler pressed for action. But the
launch-sites were not ready. Eventually, on 12 June, ten flying-
bombs were catapulted off their ramps. Four crashed on take-off;
only five reached London, causing minimal damage. In fury, Hitler
wanted to cancel production. But three days later, the sensational
effect of the successful launch of 244 V1s on London persuaded him
to change his mind. He thought the new destructive force would
quickly lead to the evacuation of London and disruption of the
Allied war effort.

The triumphalist tones of the Wehrmacht report on the launch of
the V1, and of a number of newspaper articles, were equally
fanciful, filling Goebbels — still anxious to shore up a mood of hold-
out-at-all-costs instead of dangerous optimism — with dismay. The
impression had been created, noted the Propaganda Minister with
consternation, that the war would be over within days. He was
anxious to stop such illusions. The euphoria could quickly turn into
blaming the government. He ordered the reports to be toned down,
and exaggerated expectations to be dampened — persuading Hitler
that his own instructions to the press, guaranteed to foster the
euphoric mood, should follow the new guidelines.

The continued advance of the Allies, but what seemed the new
prospects offered by the V1, prompted Hitler to fly in the evening of
16 June from Berchtesgaden together with Keitel and Jodl and the
rest of his staff to the western front to discuss the situation with his
regional commanders, Rundstedt and Rommel. He wanted to boost
their wavering morale by underlining the strengths of the V1, while
at the same time stressing the imperative need to defend the port of
Cherbourg. After their four Focke-Wulf Condors had landed in Metz,
Hitler and his entourage drove in the early hours of the next
morning in an armour-plated car to Margival, north of Soissons,
where the old Fuhrer Headquarters built in 1940 had been installed,
at great expense, with new communications equipment and
massively reinforced. The talks that morning took place in a nearby
bomb-proof railway-tunnel.

Hitler, looking pale and tired, sitting hunched on a stool, fiddled
nervously with his glasses and played with coloured pencils while
addressing his generals, who had to remain standing. Rundstedt
reported on the developments of the previous ten days, concluding
that it was now impossible to expel the Allies from France. Hitler
bitterly laid the blame at the door of the local commanders.
Rommel countered by pointing to the hopelessness of the struggle
against such massive superior force of the Allies. Hitler turned to
the V1 — a weapon, he said, to decide the war and make the English
anxious for peace. Impressed by what they had heard, the field-
marshals asked for the V1 to be used against Allied beachheads,
only to be told by General Erich Heinemann, the commander
responsible for the launch of the flying-bomb, that the weapon was
not precise enough in its targeting to allow this. Hitler promised
them, however, that they would soon have jet-fighters at their
disposal to gain control of the skies. As he himself knew, however,
these had, in fact, only just gone into production.

After lunch (taken in a bunker because of the danger of air-
attacks), Hitler spoke alone with Rommel. The discussion was
heated at times. The field-marshal painted a bleak picture of the
prospects. The western front could not be held for much longer, he

stated, beseeching Hitler to seek a political solution. ‘Pay attention
to your invasion front, not to the continuation of the war,’ was the
blunt reply he received. Hitler waited no longer, and flew back to
Salzburg that afternoon. At the Berghof that evening, dissatisfied at
the day’s proceedings, Hitler remarked to his entourage that
Rommel had lost his nerve and become a pessimist. ‘Only optimists
can pull anything off today,’ he added.

The following day, 18 June, the Americans reached the western
coast of the Cotentin peninsula, effectively cutting off the peninsula
and the port of Cherbourg from reinforcements for the Wehrmacht.
Eight days later, the German garrison in Cherbourg surrendered.
With this port in their possession (even if it took nearly a month to
repair German destruction and make use of the harbour), and
almost total control of the skies, the Allies had few further worries
about their own reinforcements. Advance against tenacious defence
was painfully slow. But the invasion had been a success. Any
prospect of forcing the Allied troops, arriving in ever greater
numbers, back into the sea had long since dissolved. Hitler was
furious that the Allies had gained the initiative. He was left now
with little more than the hope that the Alliance would split.

When Goebbels saw him for a three-hour private discussion on 21
June, he remained resistant, however, to suggestions that the time
had come to take drastic steps, finally, to introduce the ‘total war’
that the Propaganda Minister had advocated for so long. After
lunch, sitting together in the great hall of the Berghof, with its huge
window opening out to a breathtaking panorama of the Alps,
Goebbels expounded his argument. He expressed his doubts about
groundless optimism, ‘not to say illusions’, about the war. ‘Total
war’ had remained a mere slogan. The crisis had to be recognized
before it could be overcome. A thorough reform of the Wehrmacht
was urgently necessary. Goring, he had observed (here came the
usual attacks on the Reich Marshal), lived in a complete fantasy
world. The Propaganda Minister extended his attack to the
remainder of the top military leadership. The Fithrer needed a
Scharnhorst and a Gneisenau — the Prussian military heroes who had

created the army that repelled Napoleon — not a Keitel and a Fromm
(commander of the Reserve Army), he declared. Goebbels promised
that he could raise a million soldiers through a rigorous
reorganization of the Wehrmacht and draconian measures in the
civilian sphere. The people expected and wanted tough measures.
Germany was close to being plunged into a crisis which could
remove any possibility of taking such measures with any prospect of
success. It was necessary to act with realism, wholly detached from
any defeatism, and to act now.

Hitler accepted that there were some weaknesses in the
organization of the Wehrmacht, and that few of its leaders were
National Socialists. But to dispense with them during the war would
be a nonsense, since there were no replacements. All in all, Hitler
concluded, the time was not ripe for the extraordinary measures the
Propaganda Minister wanted. He told Goebbels that the instant he
felt the need to resort to ‘final measures’, he would bestow the
appropriate powers on the Propaganda Minister. But ‘for the time
being he wanted to proceed along the evolutionary, not
revolutionary, way’. Goebbels went away empty-handed, leaving
what he regarded as one of the most serious meetings he had had
with Hitler sorely disappointed.

Goebbels was evidently dubious about Hitler’s continued positive
gloss on military prospects. He doubted, correctly, the reassurances
that it ought to be possible to hold Cherbourg until the two new
divisions from the east could arrive; and Hitler’s view that a
massive panzer attack could then destroy the Allied bridgehead. On
the ‘wonder-weapons’, however, the Ftthrer’s expectations seemed
realistic enough to the Propaganda Minister. Hitler did not, he
thought, over-estimate the impact of the V1 (short for
Vergeltungswaffe-1 — ‘Retaliation Weapon 1’), as Goebbels had now
dubbed the flying-bomb. But he hoped to have the A4 rocket (later
renamed the V2) ready for launching by August, and looked to its
destructive power to help decide the war. Hitler ruled out once
again any prospect of an ‘arrangement’ with Britain, but was less
inclined — so Goebbels inferred — to dismiss the possibility at some

point of coming to terms with the Soviet Union. This could not be
entertained given the present military situation, though a significant
shift in fortunes in the Far East might alter the position. As
Goebbels realized, however, this was entering the realm of vague
musings.

The following day, 22 June 1944, exactly three years since the
beginning of Operation Barbarossa, the Red Army launched its new
big offensive in the east. Hitler had predicted that Stalin would not
be able to resist the appeal of launching his assault on that day. The
main thrust of the massive offensive — the biggest undertaken,
deploying almost 2% million men and over 5,000 tanks, backed by
5,300 planes, and given by Stalin the code-name ‘Bagration’ after a
military hero in the destruction of Napoleon’s Grand Army in 1812 -
was aimed at the Wehrmacht’s Army Group Centre. Based on fatally
flawed intelligence relayed to Chief of the General Staff Zeitzler by
the head of the eastern military intelligence service, Reinhard
Gehlen, German preparations had, in fact, anticipated an offensive
on the southern part of the front, where all the reserves and the
bulk of the panzer divisions had been concentrated. Army Group
Centre had been left with a meagre thirty-eight divisions,
comprising only half as many men and a fifth of the number of
tanks as the Red Army had, in a section of the front stretching over
some 800 miles. Only belatedly, it appears, did the realization
dawn, against Zeitzler’s continued advice, that the offensive was
likely to come against Army Group Centre. But when Field-Marshal
Ernst Busch, Commander-in-Chief of Army Group Centre,
recommended shortening the front to more defensible limits, Hitler
contemptuously asked whether he too was one of those generals
‘who always looked to the rear’.

The relatively mild beginnings of the offensive then misled
Hitler’s military advisers into thinking at first that it was a decoy.
However, the initial opening was sufficient to breach the German
defences around Vitebsk. Suddenly, the first big wave of tanks
swept through the gap. Others rapidly followed. Bombing and
heavy artillery attacks accompanied the assault. Busch appealed to

Hitler to abandon the ‘fortified places’ (Feste Pldatze) in Vitebsk,
Orsha, Mogilev, and Bobruisk, which had been established in the
spring in a vain attempt to create a set of key defensive strongholds
— fortresses to be held come what may under the command of
selected tough generals.

Hitler’s answer could have been taken as read. The ‘fortified
places’ were to be held at all costs; every square metre of land was
to be defended. Busch, one of Hitler’s fervent admirers among the
generals, accepted the order without demur. He sought to carry it
out unquestioningly as a demonstration of his loyalty. The
consequences were predictable. The Red Army swept around the
strongholds, and the German not Soviet divisions were tied down,
then encircled and finally destroyed by the forces following in the
wake of the advance troops. The Wehrmacht divisions lost through
such a disastrous tactical error would have been vital in defending
other parts of the front.

Within two days of the start of the offensive, the 3rd Panzer
Army in Vitebsk had been cut off, followed a further two days later
by the encirclement of the 9th Army near Bobruisk. By the first days
of July, the 4th Army faced the same fate near Minsk.
Reinforcements drawn from the southern part of the front could not
prevent its destruction. By the time the offensive through the centre
slowed by mid-July, the Soviet breakthrough had advanced well
over 200 miles, driven a gap 100 miles wide through the front, and
was within striking range of Warsaw. Army Group Centre had by
that time lost twenty-eight divisions with 350,000 men in a
catastrophe even greater than that at Stalingrad. By this time,
devastating offensives in the Baltic and in the south were gathering
momentum. The next months would bring even worse calamities
and, together with the unstoppable advance of the Allies in the
west, would usher in the final phase of the war.

Whatever Hitler’s capabilities as a military strategist had been, they
had paid dividends only while Germany held the whip-hand and
lightning offensives had been possible. Once a defensive strategy
had become the only one available, Hitler’s inadequacies as supreme
German warlord were fully exposed. It was not that he was wholly
devoid of tactical knowledge, despite his lack of formal training.
Nor was it the case that professionals who knew better were
invariably forced into compliance with the lunatic orders of an
amateur military bungler. Hitler’s tactics were frequently neither
inherently absurd, nor did they usually stand in crass contradiction
to the military advice he was receiving.

Even so: at points of crisis, the tensions and conflicts invariably
surfaced. And by 1944 the individual military crises were
accumulating into one almighty, life-or-death crisis for the regime
itself. Hitler’s political adroitness was by this time long gone. He
dismissed out of hand all contemplation of a possible attempt to
reach a political solution. Bridges had been burnt (as he had
indicated on several occasions); there was no way back. And, since
he refused any notion of negotiating from a position other than one
of strength, from which all his earlier successes had derived, there
was in any case no opportunity to seek a peace settlement. The
gambling instinct which had stood Hitler in such good stead down
to 1941 had long since lost its effectiveness in what had become a
backs-to-the-wall struggle. But the worse the situation became, the
more disastrously self-destructive became Hitler’s other overriding
and irrational instinct — that ‘will’ alone would triumph over all
adversity, even grossly disparate levels of manpower and
weaponry. The innate self-destructive tendency which had always
been implicit in his characteristic all-or-nothing stance as a
politician now conveyed itself, catastrophically, to military
leadership.

It was inevitable that seasoned military strategists and battle-
hardened generals, schooled in more subtle forms of tactical
command, would clash with him — often stridently — when their
reading of the options available was so diametrically at variance

with those of their supreme commander, and where the orders he
emitted seemed to them so plainly militarily suicidal. They were
also, however, schooled in obedience to orders of a superior; and
Hitler was head of state, head of the armed forces, and since 1941 —
disastrously — commander-in-chief (responsible for tactical
decisions) of the army. Refusal to obey was not only an act of
military insubordination; it was a treasonable act of political
resistance.

Few were prepared to go down that route. But loyalty even to
the extent of belief in the Fuhrer’s mission was no safeguard against
dismissal if near-impossible demands were not met. In accordance
with his warped logic, where ‘will’ had not triumphed, however
fraught the circumstances, Hitler blamed the weakness or
inadequacy of the commander. Another commander with a superior
attitude, he presumed, would bring a different result - however
objectively unfavourable the actual position. The commander of
Army Group Centre, Field-Marshal Busch, a Hitler loyalist,
correspondingly paid the price for the ‘failure’ of Army Group
Centre during the onset of the Soviet offensive. He was dismissed
by Hitler on 28 June, and replaced by one of his favourite
commanders, the tough and energetic newly-promoted Field-
Marshal Walter Model (who at the same time retained his command
of Army Group North Ukraine) — dubbed by some, given the
frequency with which he was charged with tackling a crisis, ‘Hitler’s
fireman’.

Within days, there was a change of command, too, in the west.
Reports to the High Command of the Wehrmacht submitted by the
Commander-in-Chief, Field-Marshal von Rundstedt, and the
Commander of Panzer Group West, General Geyr von
Schweppenburg, had drawn a pessimistic picture of the prospects of
holding the lines against enemy inroads in France. Jodl played to
Hitler’s sentiments by noting that this meant the first step towards
the evacuation of France. The report had followed similarly realistic
assessments of the situation on the western front delivered by
Rundstedt and Rommel at the Berghof two days earlier, on 29 June.

On 3 July, Rundstedt received a handwritten notice of his dismissal
from Hitler. Officially, he had been replaced on grounds of health.
The sacking of Geyr and Field-Marshal Hugo Sperrle, who had been
responsible for air-defences in the west, also followed. Rundstedt’s
replacement, Kluge, at that time high in Hitler’s esteem, arrived in
France, as Guderian later put it, ‘still filled with the optimism that
prevailed at Supreme Headquarters’. He soon learnt differently.
Another military leader who fell irredeemably from grace at this
time was Chief of the Army General Staff Kurt Zeitzler. When
appointed as replacement to Halder in September 1942, Zeitzler had
impressed Hitler with his drive, energy, and fighting spirit — the
type of military leader he wanted. The relationship had palled
visibly since the spring of 1944, when Hitler had pinned a major
part of the blame for the loss of the Crimea on Zeitzler. By May,
Zeitzler was indicating his wish to resign. The Chief of Staff's strong
backing at the end of June for withdrawing the threatened Army
Group North in the Baltic to a more defensible line, and his
pessimism about the situation on the western front, amounted to the
last straw. Zeitzler could no longer see the rationale of Hitler’s
tactics; Hitler was contemptuous of what he saw as the defeatism of
Zeitzler and the General Staff. At the end of his tether following
furious rows with Hitler, Zeitzler simply disappeared from the
Berghof on 1 July. He had suffered a nervous breakdown. Hitler
never spoke to him again. He would have Zeitzler dismissed from
the Wehrmacht in January 1945, refusing him the right to wear
uniform. Until his replacement, Guderian, was appointed on 21
July, the army was effectively without a Chief of the General Staff.

The Soviet advance had left the Red Army, in the northern sector
of the front, poised not far from Vilna in Lithuania. Already, the
borders of East Prussia were in their sights. On 9 July, Hitler flew
with Keitel, Donitz, Himmler, and Luftwaffe Chief of Staff General
Gunther Korten back to his old headquarters near Rastenburg in
East Prussia. Field-Marshal Model and General Johannes Friefsner,
recently appointed as commander of Army Group North in place of
General Georg Lindemann, joined them from the eastern front. The

discussions ranged mainly over plans for the urgent creation of a
number of new divisions to shore up the eastern front and protect
any inroads into East Prussia. Model and Frief’ner sounded
optimistic. Hitler, too, thought his Luftwaffe adjutant, Below, also
remained positive about developments on the eastern front. Hitler
flew back to the Berghof that afternoon. He had already hinted that,
in the light of the situation in the east, he would have to move his
headquarters back to East Prussia, even though the fortifications of
his accommodation there were still incomplete. Reading between
the lines of one or two comments, Below gained the impression, he
later wrote, that during what were to prove Hitler’s last days at the
Berghof, before he left on 14 July for the Wolf ’s Lair, never to
return, he was no longer under any illusions about the outcome of
the war. Even so, any hints of pessimism were more than countered
by repeated stress on continuing the war, the impact of the new
weapons, and ultimate victory. Once more, it was plain to Below
that Hitler would never capitulate. There would be no repeat of
1918. Hitler’s political ‘mission’ had been based from the outset on
that premiss. The entire Reich would go down in flames first.

Hitler had lived amid the relative tranquillity of the Obersalzberg
for almost four months. The regular entourage at the Berghof had
dwindled somewhat in that time. And in the days before departure
there had been few guests to enliven proceedings. Hitler himself
had seemingly become more reserved. On the last evening, perhaps
sensing he would not see the Berghof again, he had paused in front
of the pictures hanging in the great hall. Then he had kissed the
hand of Below’s wife and Frau Brandt, the wife of one of his
doctors, bidding them farewell. Next morning, 14 July, he flew back
to East Prussia, arriving at the Wolf ’s Lair, now heavily reinforced
and scarcely recognizable from its appearance when first set up in
1941. He arrived in the late morning. At one o’clock he was running
the military conference there as if he had never been away. He was
more stooping in his gait than earlier. But his continued strength of
will, despite the massive setbacks, continued to impress the
admiring Below.

For others, this strength of will — or obstinate refusal to face
reality — was precisely what was preventing an end to the war and
dragging Germany to inevitable catastrophe. They were determined
to act before it was too late — to save what was left of the Reich, lay
the foundations of a future without Hitler, and show the outside
world that there was ‘another Germany’ beyond the forces of
Nazism.

25
Luck of the Devil

The attempt to kill Hitler on 20 July 1944 had a lengthy prehistory,
dating back as far as the Sudeten crisis of 1938. The complex
strands of this prehistory contained in no small measure profound
manifestations and admixtures of high ethical values and a
transcendental sense of moral duty, codes of honour, political
idealism, religious convictions, personal courage, remarkable
selflessness, deep humanity, and a love of country that was light-
years removed from Nazi chauvinism. The prehistory was also
replete — how could it have been otherwise in the circumstances? —
with disagreements, doubts, mistakes, miscalculations, moral
dilemmas, short-sightedness, hesitancy, ideological splits, personal
clashes, bungling organization, distrust — and sheer bad luck.

The actions of a lone assassin, the Swabian joiner Georg Elser,
who shared none of the hesitancy of those within the power-
echelons of the regime, had come within a whisker of sending Hitler
into oblivion in the Burgerbraukeller on the night of 8 November
1939. Good fortune alone had saved Hitler on that occasion. With
the left-wing underground resistance groups, though never
eliminated, weak, isolated, and devoid of access to the corridors of
power, the only hope of toppling Hitler thereafter lay with those
who themselves occupied positions of some power or influence in
the regime itself.

On the fringes of the conspiracy, the participation in Nazi rule in
itself naturally created ambivalence. Breaking oaths of loyalty was
no light matter, even for some whose dislike of Hitler was evident.
Prussian values were here a double-edged sword: a deep sense of

obedience to authority and service to the state clashed with equally
profound feelings of duty to God and to country. Whichever
triumphed within an individual: whether heavy-hearted acceptance
of service to a head of state regarded as legitimately constituted,
however detested; or rejection of such allegiance in the interest of
what was taken to be the greater good, should the head of state be
leading the country to ruin; this was a matter for conscience and
judgement. It could, and did, go either way.

Though there were numerous exceptions to a broad
generalization, generational differences played some part. The
tendency was greater in a younger generation of officers, for
example, than in those who had already attained the highest ranks
of general or field-marshal, to entertain thoughts of active
participation in an attempt to overthrow the head of state. This was
implied in a remark by the man who would lead the attempt on
Hitler’s life in July 1944, Colonel Claus Schenk Graf von
Stauffenberg: ‘Since the generals have so far managed nothing, the
colonels have now to step in.’ On the other hand, views on the
morality of assassinating the head of state — in the midst of an
external struggle of titanic proportions against an enemy whose
victory threatened the very existence of a German state — differed
fundamentally on moral, not simply generational, grounds. Any
attack on the head of state constituted, of course, high treason. But
in a war, distinguishing this from treachery against one’s own
country, from betrayal to the enemy, was chiefly a matter of
individual persuasion and the relative weighting of moral values.
And only a very few were in a position to accumulate detailed and
first-hand experiences of gross inhumanity at the same time as
possessing the means to bring about Hitler’s removal. Even fewer
were prepared to act.

Beyond ethical considerations, there was the existential fear of
the awesome consequences — for the families as well as for the
individuals themselves — of discovery of any complicity in a plot to
remove the head of state and instigate a coup d’état. This was
certainly enough to deter many who were sympathetic to the aims

of the plotters but unwilling to become involved. Nor was it just the
constant dangers of discovery and physical risks that acted as a
deterrent. There was also the isolation of resistance. To enter into,
even to flirt with, the conspiracy against Hitler meant
acknowledging an inner distance from friends, colleagues,
comrades, entry into a twilight world of immense peril, and of
social, ideological, even moral isolation.

Quite apart from the evident necessity, in a terroristic police
state, of minimizing risks through maximum secrecy, the
conspirators were themselves well aware of their lack of popular
support. Even at this juncture, as the military disasters mounted and
ultimate catastrophe beckoned, the fanatical backing for Hitler had
by no means evaporated and continued, if as a minority taste, to
show remarkable resilience and strength. Those still bound up with
the dying regime, those who had invested in it, had committed
themselves to it, had burnt their boats with it, and were still true
believers in the Fuhrer, were likely to stop at nothing, as adversity
mounted, in their unbridled retribution for any sign of opposition.
But beyond the fanatics, there were many others who — naively, or
after deep reflection — thought it not merely wrong, but despicable
and treacherous, to undermine one’s own country in war.
Stauffenberg summed up the conspirators’ dilemma a few days
before he laid a bomb in the Wolf ’s Lair: ‘It is now time that
something was done. But the man who has the courage to do
something must do it in the knowledge that he will go down in
German history as a traitor. If he does not do it, however, he will
be a traitor to his own conscience.’

As this implies, the need to avoid a stab-in-the-back legend such
as that which had followed the end of the First World War and left
such a baleful legacy for the ill-fated Weimar Republic was a
constant burden and anxiety for those who had decided — sometimes
with a heavy heart — that Germany’s future rested on their capacity
to remove Hitler, violently or not, from the scene, constitute a new
government, and seek peace terms. They worried about the
consequences of removing Hitler and seeming to stab the war effort

in the back after a major disaster, even when final victory had
become no more than a chimera. Rather than controlling the
moment for a strike, the conspirators let it rest on external
contingencies that, in the nature of things, they could not
orchestrate.

When the strike eventually came, with the invasion consolidated
in the west and the Red Army pressing towards the borders of the
Reich in the east, the conspirators themselves recognized that they
had missed the chance to influence the possible outcome of the war
through their action. As one of their key driving-forces, Major-
General Henning von Tresckow, from late 1943 Chief of Staff of the
2nd Army in the southern section of the eastern front, put it: ‘It’s
not a matter any more of the practical aim, but of showing the
world and history that the German resistance movement at risk of
life has dared the decisive stroke. Everything else is a matter of
indifference alongside that.’

All prospects of opposition to Hitler had been dimmed following the
astonishing chain of military successes between autumn 1939 and
spring 1941. Then, following the promulgation of the notorious
Commissar Law, ordering the liquidation of captured Red Army
political commissars, it had been Tresckow, Field-Marshal von
Bock’s first staff officer at Army Group Centre, who had been
instrumental in revitalizing thoughts of resistance among a number
of front officers - some of them purposely selected on account of
their anti-regime stance. Born in 1901, tall, balding, with a serious
demeanour, a professional soldier, fervent upholder of Prussian
values, cool and reserved but at the same time a striking and
forceful personality, disarmingly modest, but with iron
determination, Tresckow had been an early admirer of Hitler
though had soon turned into an unbending critic of the lawless and
inhumane policies of the regime. Those whom Tresckow was able to
bring to Army Group Centre included close allies in the emerging

conspiracy against Hitler, notably Fabian von Schlabrendorff — six
years younger than Tresckow himself, trained in law, who would
serve as a liaison between Army Group Centre and other focal
points of the conspiracy — and Rudolph-Christoph Freiherr von
Gersdorff, born in 1905, a professional soldier, already an arch-critic
of Hitler, and now located in a key position in the intelligence
section of Army Group Centre. But attempts to persuade Bock,
together with the other two group commanders on the eastern
front, Rundstedt and Leeb, to confront Hitler and refuse orders
failed. Any realistic prospect of opposition from the front
disappeared again until late 1942. By then, in the wake of the
unfolding Stalingrad crisis and seeing Hitler as responsible for the
certain ruin of Germany, Tresckow was ready to assassinate him.

During the course of 1942, a number of focal points of practically
dormant opposition within Germany itself - army and civilian — had
begun to flicker back to life. The savagery of the warfare on the
eastern front and, in the light of the winter crisis of 1941-2, the
magnitude of the calamity towards which Hitler was steering
Germany, had revitalized the notions, still less than concrete, that
something must be done. Ludwig Beck (former Chief of the Army
General Staff), Carl Goerdeler (one-time Reich Price Commissar),
Johannes Popitz (Prussian Finance Minister), and Ulrich von Hassell
(earlier the German Ambassador in Rome) — all connected with the
pre-war conspiracy — met up again in Berlin in March 1942, but
decided there were as yet few prospects. Even so, it was agreed that
Beck would serve as a central point for the embryonic opposition.
Meetings were held soon after with Colonel Hans Oster — head of
the central office dealing with foreign intelligence in the Abwehr,
the driving-force behind the 1938 conspiracy, who had leaked
Germany’s invasion plans to Holland in 1940 — and Hans von
Dohnanyi, a jurist who had also played a significant part in the 1938
plot, and, like Oster, used his position in the foreign section of the
Abwehr to develop good contacts to officers with oppositional
tendencies. Around the same time, Oster engineered a close link to
a new and important recruit to the oppositional groups, General

Friedrich Olbricht, head of the General Army Office in Berlin.
Olbricht, born in 1888 and a career soldier, was not one to seek the
limelight. He epitomized the desk-general, the organizer, the
military administrator. But he was unusual in his pro-Weimar
attitude before 1933, and, thereafter — driven largely by Christian
and patriotic feelings — in his consistent anti-Hitler stance, even
amid the jubilation of the foreign-policy triumphs of the 1930s and
the victories of the first phase of the war. His role would emerge as
the planner of the coup d’état that was to follow upon the successful
assassination of Hitler.

Already as the Stalingrad crisis deepened towards the end of
1942, Tresckow - later described by the Gestapo as ‘without doubt
one of the driving-forces and the “evil spirit” of the putschist
circles’, and allegedly referred to by Stauffenberg as his ‘guiding
master’ — was pressing for the assassination of Hitler without delay.
He had become convinced that nothing could be expected of the top
military leadership in initiating a coup. ‘They would only follow an
order,’ was his view. He took it upon himself to provide the
‘ignition’, as the conspirators labelled the assassination of Hitler that
would lead to their removal of the Nazi leadership and takeover of
the state. Tresckow had already in the summer of 1942
commissioned Gersdorff with the task of obtaining suitable
explosives. Olbricht, meanwhile, coordinated the links with the
other conspirators in Berlin and laid the groundwork for a coup to
take place in March 1943. The plans to occupy important civilian
and military positions in Berlin and other major cities were, in
essence, along the lines that were to be followed in July 1944.

One obvious problem was how to get close enough to Hitler to
carry out an assassination. Hitler’s movements were unpredictable.
An undependable schedule had in mid-February 1943 vitiated the
intention of two officers, General Hubert Lanz and Major-General
Hans Speidel, of arresting Hitler on an expected visit to Army Group
B headquarters at Poltava. The visit did not materialize. Hitler’s
personal security had, meanwhile, been tightened considerably. He
was invariably surrounded by SS bodyguards, pistols at the ready,

and was always driven by his own chauffeur, Erich Kempka, in one
of his limousines, which were stationed at different points in the
Reich and in the occupied territories. And Schmundt, Hitler’s
Wehrmacht adjutant, had told Tresckow and Gersdorff that Hitler
wore a bullet-proof vest and hat. This helped persuade them that
the possibilities of a selected assassin having time to pull out his
pistol, aim accurately, and ensure that his shot would kill Hitler
were not great.

Nevertheless, preparations were made to shoot Hitler on a visit to
Army Group Centre headquarters at Smolensk on 13 March. This
plan was abandoned, since there was a distinct possibility of Field-
Marshal von Kluge, commander of Army Group Centre, and other
senior officers being killed alongside Hitler. Tresckow reverted to
the original plan to blow up Hitler. During the meal at which, had
the original plans been carried out, Hitler would have been shot,
Tresckow asked one of the Fuhrer’s entourage, Lieutenant-Colonel
Heinz Brandt, travelling in Hitler’s plane, to take back a package for
him to Colonel Hellmuth Stieff in Army High Command. The
package looked like two bottles of cognac. It was, in fact, two parts
of a bomb that Tresckow had put together.

Schlabrendorff carried the package to the aerodrome and gave it
to Brandt just as he was climbing into Hitler’s Condor ready for
take-off. Moments before, Schlabrendorff had pressed the fuse
capsule to activate the detonator, set for thirty minutes. It could be
expected that Hitler would be blown from the skies shortly before
the plane reached Minsk. Schlabrendorff returned as quickly as
possible to headquarters and informed the Berlin opposition in the
Abwehr that the ‘ignition’ for the coup had been undertaken. But no
news came of an explosion. The tension among Tresckow’s group
was palpable. Hours later, they heard that Hitler had landed safely
at Rastenburg. Schlabrendorff gave the code-word through to Berlin
that the attempt had failed. Why there had been no explosion was a
mystery. Probably the intense cold had prevented the detonation.
For the nervous conspirators, ruminations about the likely cause of
failure now took second place to the vital need to recover the

incriminating package. Next morning, Schlabrendorff flew to Army
High Command with two genuine bottles of cognac, retrieved the
bomb, retreated to privacy, cautiously opened the packet with a
razor-blade, and with great relief defused it. Mixed with relief, the
disappointment among the opposition at such a lost chance was
intense.

Immediately, however, another opportunity beckoned. Gersdorff
had the possibility of attending the ‘Heroes’ Memorial Day’, to take
place on 21 March 1943 in Berlin. Gersdorff declared himself ready
to sacrifice his own life in order to blow up Hitler during the
ceremony. The attempt was to be made while Hitler was visiting an
exhibition of captured Soviet war-booty, laid on to fill in the time
between the ceremony in the Zeughaus (the old armoury in the
centre of Berlin), and the wreath-laying at the cenotaph outside.
Gersdorff positioned himself at the entry to the exhibition, in the
rooms of the Zeughaus. He raised his right arm to greet Hitler as
the dictator came by. At the same moment, with his left hand, he
pressed the detonator charge on the bomb. The best fuse he had
been able to come up with lasted ten minutes. He expected Hitler to
be in the exhibition for half an hour, more than enough time for the
bomb to go off. But this year, possibly fearing an Allied air-raid,
Hitler raced through the exhibition, scarcely glancing at the
material assembled for him, and was outside within two minutes.
Gersdorff could follow Hitler no further. He sought out the nearest
toilet and deftly defused the bomb.

Once again, astonishing luck had accompanied Hitler. The
depressed and shocked mood following Stalingrad had probably also
offered the best possible psychological moment for a coup against
him. A successful undertaking at that time might, despite the
recently announced ‘Unconditional Surrender’ strategy of the Allies,
have stood a chance of splitting them. The removal of the Nazi
leadership and offer of capitulation in the west that Tresckow
intended would at any rate have placed the western Allies with a
quandary about whether to respond to peace-feelers.

Overtures by opposition groups to the western Allies had been
systematically rebuffed long before this time. The resistance was
regarded by the British war-leadership (and the Americans shared
the view) as little more than a hindrance. A successful coup from
within could, it was felt, endanger the alliance with the Soviet
Union - exactly the strategy which the conspirators were hoping to
achieve — and would cause difficulties in establishing the post-war
order in Germany. With the war turning remorselessly in their
favour, the Allies were less than ever inclined to give much truck to
an internal opposition which, it appeared, had claimed much but
achieved nothing, and, furthermore, entertained expectations of
holding on to some of the territorial gains that Hitler had made.

This was indeed the case, certainly with some of the older
members of the national-conservative group aligned to Goerdeler
whose break with Hitler had already taken place in the mid-1930s.
These despised the barbarism of the Nazi regime. But they were
keen to re-establish Germany’s status as a major power, and
continued to see the Reich dominating central and eastern Europe.
Internally, their ideas were essentially (despite differences of
emphasis) oligarchic and authoritarian. They favoured a restoration
of the monarchy and limited electoral rights in self-governing
communities, resting on Christian family values — the embodiment
of the true ‘national community’ which the Nazis had corrupted.

The notions of Goerdeler and his close associates, whose age,
mentality, and upbringing inclined them to look back to the pre-
1914 Reich for much of their inspiration, found little favour among
a group of a younger generation (mainly born during the first
decade of the twentieth century) which gained its common identity
through outright opposition to Hitler and his regime. The group,
whose leaders were mainly of aristocratic descent, came to be
known as ‘the Kreisau Circle’, a term coined by the Gestapo and
drawn from the estate in Silesia where the group held a number of
its meetings. The estate belonged to one its central figures, Helmuth
James Graf von Moltke, born in 1907, trained in law, a great
admirer of British traditions, a descendant of the famous Chief of

the General Staff of the Prussian army in Bismarck’s era. The ideas
of the Kreisau Circle for a ‘new order’ after Hitler dated back in
embryo to 1940, when they were first elaborated by Moltke and his
close friend and relative Peter Graf Yorck von Wartenburg, three
years older, also trained in law, a formative figure in the group, and
with good contacts to the military opposition. Both had rejected
Nazism and its gross inhumanity from an early stage. By 1942-3
they were drawing to meetings at Kreisau and in Berlin a number of
like-minded friends and associates, ranging across social classes and
denominational divisions, including the former Oxford Rhodes
Scholar and foreign-policy spokesman of the group, Adam von Trott
zu Solz, the Social Democrat Carlo Mierendorff, the socialist
pedagogical expert Adolf Reichwein, the Jesuit priest Pater Alfred
Delp, and the Protestant pastor Eugen Gerstenmaier.

The Kreisau Circle drew heavily for its inspiration on the idealism
of the German youth movement, socialist and Christian
philosophies, and experiences of the post-war misery and rise of
National Socialism. Moltke, Yorck, and their associates — unlike the
Goerdeler group — had no desire to hold on to German hegemony on
the continent. They looked instead to a future in which national
sovereignty (and the nationalist ideologies which underpinned it)
would give way to a federal Europe, modelled in part on the United
States of America. They were well aware that major territorial
concessions would have to be made by Germany, along with some
form of reparation for the peoples of Europe who had suffered so
grievously under Nazi rule. Their concept of a new form of state
rested heavily upon German Christian and social ideals, looking to
democratization from below, through self-governing communities
working on the basis of social justice, guaranteed by a central state
that was little more than an umbrella organization for localized and
particularized interests within a federal structure.

Such notions were inevitably utopian. The Kreisau Circle had no
arms to back it, and no access to Hitler. It was dependent upon the
army for action. Moltke, who opposed assassination, and Yorck,
quite especially, pressed on a number of occasions for a coup to

unseat Hitler. This still left out of the equation how to remove
Hitler, and who should do it. Rather than utopian visions of a future
social and political order, this was the primary issue that continued
to preoccupy Tresckow and his fellow officers who had committed
themselves to the opposition. The problem became, if anything,
more rather than less difficult during the summer and autumn of
1943. Any expectation that Manstein might commit himself to the
opposition was wholly dashed in the summer. ‘Prussian field-
marshals do not mutiny,’ was his lapidary response to Gersdorff ’s
probings. Manstein was at least honest and straightforward. Kluge,
by contrast, blew hot and cold — offering backing to Tresckow and
Gersdorff, then retreating from it. There was nothing to be gained
from that quarter, though those in the opposition continued to
persist in the delusion that Kluge was ultimately on their side.

There were other setbacks. Beck was meanwhile quite seriously
ill. And Fritz-Dietlof Graf von der Schulenburg — a lawyer by
training, who after initially sympathizing with National Socialism
and holding a number of high administrative positions in the
regime, had come to serve as a liaison between the military and
civilian opposition — was interrogated on suspicion that he was
involved in plans for a coup, though later released. Others,
including Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the radically minded evangelical
pastor, were also arrested, as the tentacles of the Gestapo
threatened to entangle the leading figures in the resistance. Even
worse: Hans von Dohnanyi and Hans Oster from the Abwehr were
arrested in April, initially for alleged foreign currency irregularities,
though this drew suspicion on their involvement in political
opposition. The head of the Abwehr, Admiral Canaris, a professional
obfuscator, managed for a time to throw sand in the eyes of the
Gestapo agents. But as a centre of the resistance, the Abwehr had
become untenable. By February 1944, its foreign department, which
Oster had controlled, was incorporated into the Reich Security Head
Office, and Canaris, dubious figure that he was for the opposition,
himself placed under house arrest.

Tresckow, partly while on leave in Berlin, was tireless in
attempting to drive on the plans for action against Hitler. But in
October 1943, he was stationed at the head of a regiment at the
front, away from his previously influential position in Army Group
Centre headquarters. At the same time, in any case, Kluge was
injured in a car accident and replaced by Field-Marshal Ernst Busch,
an outright Hitler-loyalist, so that an assassination attempt from
Army Group Centre could now be ruled out. At this point, Olbricht
revived notions, previously entertained but never sustained, of
carrying out both the strike against Hitler and the subsequent coup,
not through the front army, but from the headquarters of the
reserve army in Berlin. Finding an assassin, with access to Hitler,
had been a major problem. Now, one was close at hand.

Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg came from a Swabian
aristocratic family. Born in 1907, the youngest of three brothers, he
grew up under the influence of Catholicism — though his family
were non-practising — and of the youth movement. He became
particularly attracted to the ideas of the poet Stefan George, then
held in extraordinary esteem by an impressionable circle of young
admirers, strangely captivated by his vague, neo-conservative
cultural mysticism which looked away from the sterilities of
bourgeois existence towards a new élite of aristocratic aestheticism,
godliness, and manliness. Like many young officers, Stauffenberg
was initially attracted by aspects of National Socialism — not least its
renewed emphasis on the value of strong armed forces and its anti-
Versailles foreign policy — but rejected its racial antisemitism and,
after the Blomberg-—Fritsch crisis of early 1938, was increasingly
critical of Hitler and his drive to war. Even so, serving in Poland he
was contemptuous of the Polish people, approved of the
colonization of the country, and was enthusiastic about the German
victory. He was still more jubilant after the stunning successes in
the western campaign, and hinted that he had changed his views on
Hitler.

The mounting barbarity of the regime nevertheless appalled him.
And when he turned irredeemably against Hitler in the late spring

of 1942, it was under the influence of incontrovertible eye-witness
reports of massacres of Ukrainian Jews by SS men. Hearing the
reports, Stauffenberg concluded that Hitler must be removed.
Serving in North Africa with the 10th Panzer Division, he was badly
wounded in April 1943, losing his left eye, his right hand, and two
fingers from his left hand. Soon after his discharge from hospital in
August, speaking to Friedrich Olbricht about a new post as chief of
staff in the General War Office in Berlin, he was tentatively asked
about joining the resistance. There was little doubt what his answer
would be. He had already come to the conclusion that the only way
to deal with Hitler was to kill him.

By early September, Stauffenberg had been introduced to the
leading figures in the opposition. Like Tresckow, he was a man of
action, an organizer more than a theoretician. He deliberated with
Tresckow in autumn 1943 about the best way to assassinate Hitler
and the related but separate issue of organizing the coup to follow.
As a means of taking over the state, they came up with the idea of
recasting an operational plan, code-named ‘Valkyrie’, already
devised by Olbricht and approved by Hitler, for mobilizing the
reserve army within Germany in the event of serious internal
unrest. No later than mid-October, Tresckow had produced an
elaborate draft. It envisaged a strike to be carried out by the 18th
Artillery Division of Army Group Centre, not just against Hitler, but
also against Himmler, Goring, and Ribbentrop, to take place at their
respective headquarters in East Prussia. The coup was to be
unleashed by the declaration that ‘treacherous elements from the SS
and the party are attempting to exploit the situation to stab the
[army] fighting hard on the eastern front in the back, and to seize
power for their own purposes’, demanding the proclamation of
martial law. The aim of ‘Valkyrie’ had been to protect the regime; it
was now transformed into a strategy for removing it.

Unleashing ‘Valkyrie’ posed two problems, however, once
Tresckow’s new stationing in mid-October meant that the coup
would have to be directed from Berlin, not from Army Group
Centre. The first was that, in the changed circumstances, the

command had to be issued by the head of the reserve army. This
was Colonel-General Friedrich Fromm, born in 1888 into a
Protestant family with strong military traditions, a huge man,
somewhat reserved in character, with strong beliefs in the army as
the guarantor of Germany’s status as a world-power. Fromm was no
outright Hitler loyalist, but a fence-sitter who remained non-
committal in his cautious desire to keep his options open and back
whichever came out on top, the regime or the putschists — a policy
which would eventually backfire upon him. The other problem was
the old one of access to Hitler. Tresckow had concluded that only an
assassination attempt in Fuhrer Headquarters could get round the
unpredictability of Hitler’s schedule and the tight security
precautions surrounding him. The difficulty was to find someone
prepared to carry out the attempt who had reason to be in Hitler’s
close proximity in Fuhrer Headquarters.

Stauffenberg, who had brought new dynamism to the sagging
momentum of the opposition, wanted a strike against Hitler by mid-
November. But who would carry it out? Two officers approached by
Stauffenberg declined. The attempt had to be postponed.
Meanwhile, Stauffenberg had been introduced to Captain Axel
Freiherr von dem Bussche, whose courage in action had won him
the Iron Cross, First Class, among other decorations. Witnessing a
mass shooting of thousands of Jews in the Ukraine in October 1942
had been a searing experience for Bussche, and opened him to any
prospect of doing away with Hitler and his regime. He was
prepared to sacrifice his own life by springing on Hitler with a
detonated grenade while the Fuhrer was visiting a display of new
uniforms.

Bad luck continued to dog the plans. One such uniform display, in
December 1943, had to be cancelled when the train carrying the
new uniforms was hit in an air-raid and the uniforms destroyed.
Before Bussche could be brought back for another attempt, he was
badly wounded on the eastern front in January 1944, losing a leg
and dropping out of consideration for Stauffenberg’s plans.

Lieutenant Ewald Heinrich von Kleist, son of the Prussian
landowner, and long-standing critic of Hitler, Ewald von Kleist-
Schmenzin, expressed himself willing to take over. Everything was
set for Hitler’s visit to a uniform display in mid-February. But the
display was once again cancelled.

Yet another chance arose when Rittmeister Eberhard von
Breitenbuch, aide-de-camp to Field-Marshal Busch (Kluge’s successor
as Commander-in-Chief of Army Group Centre) and already
initiated in plans to eliminate Hitler, had the opportunity to
accompany Busch to a military briefing at the Berghof on 11 March
1944. Breitenbuch had declared himself ready to shoot Hitler in the
head. His Browning pistol was in his trouser pocket, and ready to
fire as soon as he came close to Hitler. But on this occasion, ADCs
were not permitted in the briefing. Luck was still on Hitler’s side.

Even Stauffenberg began to lose heart — especially once the
western Allies had established a firm footing on the soil of France.
The Gestapo by now had the scent of the opposition; a number of
arrests of leading figures pointed to the intensifying danger. Would
it not now be better to await the inevitable defeat? Would even a
successful strike against Hitler be anything more than a largely
empty gesture? Tresckow gave the answer: it was vital that the
coup took place, that the outside world should see that there was a
German resistance movement prepared at the cost of its members’
lives to topple such an unholy regime.

A last opportunity presented itself. On 1 July 1944, now
promoted to colonel, Stauffenberg was appointed Fromm’s chief of
staff — in effect, his deputy. It provided him with what had been
hitherto lacking: access to Hitler at military briefings related to the
home army. He no longer needed look for someone to carry out the
assassination. He could do it himself.

The difficulty with Stauffenberg taking over the role of assassin
was that he would be needed at the same time in Berlin to organize
the coup from the headquarters of the reserve army. The double
role meant that the chances of failure were thereby enhanced. It
was far from ideal. But the risk had to be taken.

On 6 July, Stauffenberg was present, for the first time in his
capacity as chief of staff to Fromm, at two hour-long briefings at the
Berghof. He had explosives with him. But, it seems, an appropriate
opportunity did not present itself. Whatever the reason, he made no
attempt on this occasion. Impatient to act, Stauffenberg resolved to
try at his next visit to the Berghof, five days later. But the absence
of Himmler, whom the conspirators wanted to eliminate along with
Hitler, deterred him. Again, nothing happened. On 15 July, when he
was once more at Fuhrer Headquarters (now moved back to the
Wolf ’s Lair in East Prussia), Stauffenberg was determined to act.
Once more, nothing happened. Most probably, it seems, he had
been unable to set the charge in time for the first of the three
briefings that afternoon. While the second short briefing was taking
place, he was telephoning Berlin to clarify whether he should in any
case go through with the attempt in the absence of Himmler. And
during the third briefing, he was himself directly involved in the
presentation, which deprived him of all possibility of priming the
bomb and carrying out the attack. This time, Olbricht even issued
the ‘Valkyrie’ order. It had to be passed off as a practice alarm-drill.
The error could not be repeated. Next time, the issue of the
‘Valkyrie’ order could not go out ahead of the assassination attempt.
It would have to wait for Stauffenberg’s confirmation that Hitler
was dead. After the bungling of the opportunity on the 15th, the
third time that he had taken such a high risk to no avail,
Stauffenberg prepared for what he told his fellow conspirators,
gathered at his home in Berlin’s Wannsee on the evening of 16 July,
would be a last attempt. This would take place during his next visit
to the Wolf ’s Lair, in the briefing scheduled for 20 July.

Ill

After a two-hour flight from Berlin, Stauffenberg and his adjutant,
Lieutenant Werner von Haeften, landed at Rastenburg at 10.15 a.m.
on 20 July. Stauffenberg was immediately driven the four miles to
the Wolf ’s Lair. Haeften accompanied Major-General Stieff, who

had flown in the same plane, to Army High Command, before
returning later to Fuhrer Headquarters. By 11.30 a.m. Stauffenberg
was in a pre-briefing, directed by Keitel, that lasted three-quarters
of an hour. Time was pressing since Hitler’s briefing, owing to the
arrival of Mussolini that afternoon, was to take place half an hour
earlier than usual, at 12.30 p.m.

As soon as the meeting with Keitel was over, Stauffenberg asked
where he could freshen up and change his shirt. It was a hot day,
and an unremarkable request; but he needed to hurry. Haeften,
carrying the briefcase containing the bomb, met him in the corridor.
As soon as they were in the toilet, they began hastily to prepare to
set the time-fuses in the two explosive devices they had brought
with them, and to place the devices, each weighing around a
kilogram, in Stauffenberg’s briefcase. Stauffenberg set the first
charge. The bomb could go off any time after quarter of an hour,
given the hot and stuffy conditions, and would explode within half
an hour at most. Outside, Keitel was getting impatient. Just then, a
telephone call came from General Erich Fellgiebel, head of
communications at Wehrmacht High Command and commissioned,
in the plot against Hitler, with the vital task of blocking
communications to and from Fuhrer Headquarters following an
assassination attempt. Keitel’s adjutant, Major Ernst John von
Freyend, took the call. Fellgiebel wanted to speak to Stauffenberg
and requested him to call back. There was no time for that. Freyend
sent Sergeant-Major Werner Vogel to tell Stauffenberg of
Fellgiebel’s message, and to hurry him along. Vogel found
Stauffenberg and Haeften busy with some object. On being told to
hurry, Stauffenberg brusquely replied that he was on his way.
Freyend then shouted that he should come along at once. Vogel
waited by the open door. Stauffenberg hastily closed his briefcase.
There was no chance of setting the time-fuse for the second device
he and Haeften had brought with them. Haeften stuffed this, along
with sundry papers, in his own bag. It was a decisive moment. Had
the second device, even without the charge being set, been placed
in Stauffenberg’s bag along with the first, it would have been

detonated by the explosion, more than doubling the effect. Almost
certainly, in such an event, no one would have survived.

The briefing, taking place as usual in the wooden barrack-hut
inside the high fence of the closely guarded inner perimeter of the
Wolf ’s Lair, had already begun when Stauffenberg was ushered in.
Hitler, seated in the middle of the long side of the table nearest to
the door, facing the windows, was listening to Major-General Adolf
Heusinger, chief of operations at General Staff headquarters,
describe the rapidly worsening position on the eastern front. Hitler
absent-mindedly shook hands with Stauffenberg, when Keitel
introduced him, and returned to Heusinger’s report. Stauffenberg
had requested a place as close as possible to the Fuhrer. His hearing
disability, together with the need to have his papers close to hand
when he reported on the creation of a number of new divisions
from the reserve army to help block the Soviet breakthrough into
Poland and East Prussia, gave him a good excuse. Room was found
for him on Hitler’s right, towards the end of the table. Freyend,
who had carried Stauffenberg’s briefcase into the room, placed it
under the table, against the outside of the solid right-hand table-leg.

No sooner had he arrived in the room, than Stauffenberg made an
excuse to leave it. This attracted no special attention. There was
much to-ing and fro-ing during the daily conferences. Attending to
important telephone calls or temporarily being summoned away
was a regular occurrence. Stauffenberg left his cap and belt behind
to suggest that he would be returning. Once outside the room, he
asked Freyend to arrange the connection for the call which he still
had to make to General Fellgiebel. But as soon as Freyend returned
to the briefing, Stauffenberg hung up and hurried back to the
Wehrmacht adjutants’ building, where he met Haeften and
Fellgiebel. Lieutenant Ludolf Gerhard Sander, a communications
officer in Fellgiebel’s department, was also there. Stauffenberg’s
absence in the briefing had meanwhile been noted; he had been
needed to provide a point of information during Heusinger’s
presentation. But there was no sinister thought in anyone’s mind at
this point. At the adjutancy, Stauffenberg and Haeften were

anxiously making arrangements for the car that had been organized
to rush them to the airfield. At that moment, they heard a deafening
explosion from the direction of the barracks. Fellgiebel gave
Stauffenberg a startled look. Stauffenberg shrugged his shoulders.
Sander seemed unsurprised. Mines around the complex were
constantly being detonated by wild animals, he remarked. It was
around quarter to one.

Stauffenberg and Haeften left for the airfield in their chauffeured
car as expeditiously as could be done without causing suspicion. The
alarm had still not been raised when Stauffenberg bluffed his way
past the guards on the gate of the inner zone. He had greater
difficulty leaving the outer perimeter. The alarm had by then been
sounded. He had to telephone an officer, Rittmeister (cavalry
captain) Leonhard von Mollendorf, who knew him and was
prepared to authorize his passage. Once out, it was full speed along
the bending road to the airfield. On the way, Haeften hurled away a
package containing the second explosive. The car dropped them 100
yards from the waiting plane, and immediately turned back. By 1.15
p.m. they were on their way back to Berlin. They were firmly
convinced that Hitler was dead.

Hitler had been bent over the heavy oaken table, propped up on
his elbow, chin in his hand, studying air reconnaissance positions on
a map, when the bomb went off — with a flash of blue and yellow
flame and an ear-splitting explosion. Windows and doors blew out.
Clouds of thick smoke billowed up. Flying glass splinters, pieces of
wood, and showers of paper and other debris flew in all directions.
Parts of the wrecked hut were aflame. For a time there was
pandemonium. Twenty-four persons had been in the briefing-hut at
the time of the explosion. Some were hurled to the floor or blown
across the room. Others had hair or clothes in flames. There were
cries of help. Human shapes stumbled around —- concussed, part-
blinded, eardrums shattered — in the smoke and debris, desperately
seeking to get out of the ruins of the hut. The less fortunate lay in
the wreckage, some fatally injured. Of those in the barrack-hut,

only Keitel and Hitler avoided concussion; and Keitel alone escaped
burst eardrums.

Hitler had, remarkably, survived with no more than superficial
injuries. After the initial shock of the blast, he established that he
was all in one piece and could move. Then he made for the door
through the wreckage, beating flames from his trousers and putting
out the singed hair on the back of his head as he went. He bumped
into Keitel, who embraced him, weeping and crying out: ‘My
Fuhrer, you are alive, you are alive!’ Keitel helped Hitler, his
uniform jacket torn, his black trousers and beneath them long white
underwear in shreds, out of the building. But he was able to walk
without difficulty. He immediately returned to his bunker. Dr
Morell was summoned urgently. Hitler had a swollen and painful
right arm, which he could barely lift, swellings and abrasions on his
left arm, burns and blisters on his hands and legs (which were also
full of wood-splinters), and cuts to his forehead. But those,
alongside the burst eardrums, were the worst injuries he had
suffered. When Linge, his valet, panic-stricken, rushed in, Hitler was
composed, and with a grim smile on his face said: ‘Linge, someone
has tried to kill me.’

Below, Hitler’s Luftwaffe adjutant, had been composed enough,
despite the shock and the lacerations to his face through glass
shards, to rush to the signals hut, where he demanded a block on all
communications apart from those from Hitler, Keitel, and Jodl. At
the same time, Below had Himmler and Goring summoned to
Hitler’s bunker. Then he made his way there himself. Hitler was
sitting in his study, relief written on his face, ready to show off —
with a tinge of pride, it seemed — his shredded clothing. His
attention had already turned to the question of who had carried out
the assassination attempt. According to Below, he rejected
suggestions (which he appears initially to have believed) that the
bomb had been planted by Organisation Todt workers who were
temporarily at Fuhrer Headquarters to complete the reinforcement
of the compound against air-raids. By this time, suspicion had
turned indubitably to the missing Stauffenberg. The search for

Stauffenberg and investigation into the assassination attempt began
around 2 p.m., though it was not at that point realized that this had
been the signal for a general uprising against the regime. Hitler’s
rage at the army leaders he had always distrusted mounted by the
minute. He was ready to wreak terrible vengeance on those whom
he saw as stabbing the Reich in the back in its hour of crisis.

Stauffenberg was by now well on his way back to Berlin. The
conspirators there were anxiously awaiting his return, or news of
what had happened to him, hesitating to act, still unsure whether to
proceed with ‘Operation Valkyrie’. The message that Fellgiebel had
managed to get through, even before Stauffenberg had taken off
from Rastenburg, was less clear than he thought. It was that
something terrible had happened; the Fihrer was still alive. That
was all. There were no details. It was unclear whether the bomb
had gone off, whether Stauffenberg had been prevented (as a few
days earlier) from carrying out the attack, or whether Stauffenberg
had been arrested, whether, in fact, he was even still alive. Further
messages seeping through indicated that something had certainly
happened in the Wolf ’s Lair, but that Hitler had survived. Should
‘Valkyrie’ still go ahead? No contingency plans had been made for
carrying out a coup if Hitler were still alive. And without confirmed
news of Hitler’s death, Fromm, in his position as commander of the
reserve army, would certainly not give his approval for the coup.
Olbricht concluded that to take any action before hearing definitive
news would be to court disaster for all concerned. Vital time was
lost. Meanwhile, it had only proved temporarily possible to block
communications from the Wolf ’s Lair. Soon after 4 p.m. that
afternoon, before any coup had been started, the lines were fully
open again.

Stauffenberg arrived back in Berlin between 2.45 and 3.15 p.m.
There was no car to meet him. His chauffeur was waiting at
Rangsdorf aerodrome. But Stauffenberg’s plane had flown to

Tempelhof (or possibly another Berlin aerodrome — this detail is not
fully clear), and he had impatiently to telephone for a car to take
him and Haeften to Bendlerstrafie. It was a further delay.
Stauffenberg did not reach the headquarters of the conspiracy,
where tension was at fever-pitch, until 4.30 p.m. Haeften had in the
meantime telephoned from the aerodrome to Bendlerstrafge. He
announced — the first time the conspirators heard the message — that
Hitler was dead. Stauffenberg repeated this when he and Haeften
arrived in Bendlerstrafse. He had stood with General Fellgiebel
outside the barrack-hut, he said, and seen with his own eyes first-aid
men running to help and emergency vehicles arriving. No one could
have survived such an explosion, was his conclusion. However
convincing he was for those anxious to believe his message, a key
figure, Colonel-General Fromm, knew otherwise. He had spoken to
Keitel around 4 p.m. and been told that the Fuhrer had suffered only
minor injuries. That apart, Keitel had asked where, in the

meantime, Colonel Stauffenberg might be.

Fromm refused outright Olbricht’s request that he should sign the
orders for ‘Valkyrie’. But by the time Olbricht had returned to his
room to announce Fromm’s refusal, his impatient chief of staff
Colonel Mertz von Quirnheim, a friend of Stauffenberg, and long
closely involved in the plot, had already begun the action with a
cabled message to regional military commanders, beginning with
the words: ‘The Ftihrer, Adolf Hitler, is dead.” When Fromm tried to
have Mertz arrested, Stauffenberg informed him that, on the
contrary, it was he, Fromm, who was under arrest.

By now, several of the leading conspirators had been contacted
and had begun assembling in the Bendlerstrafge. Beck was there,
already announcing that he had taken over command in the state;
and that Field-Marshal Erwin von Witzleben, former commander-in-
chief in France, and long involved in the conspiracy, was new
commander-in-chief of the army. Colonel-General Hoepner,
Fromm’s designated successor in the coup, dismissed by Hitler in
disgrace in early 1942 and forbidden to wear a uniform again,

arrived around 4.30 p.m. in civilian clothes, carrying a suitcase. It
contained his uniform, which he donned once more that evening.

Scenes in the Bendlerstrafge were increasingly chaotic. Conspiring
to arrange a coup d’état in a police state is scarcely a simple matter.
But even in the existential circumstances prevailing, much smacked
of dilettante organization. Too many loose ends had been left
dangling. Too little attention had been paid to small but important
details in timing, coordination, and, not least, communications.
Nothing had been done about blowing up the communications
centre at Fuhrer Headquarters or otherwise putting it permanently
out of action. No steps were taken to gain immediate control of
radio stations in Berlin and other cities. No broadcast was made by
the putschists. Party and SS leaders were not arrested. The master-
propagandist, Goebbels himself, was left at bay. Among the
conspirators, too many were involved in issuing and carrying out
commands. There was too much uncertainty; and too much
hesitation. Everything had been predicated upon killing Hitler. It
had simply been taken for granted that if Stauffenberg succeeded in
exploding his bomb, Hitler would be dead. Once that premiss was
called into question, then disproved, the haphazard lines of a plan
for the coup d’état swiftly unravelled. What was crucial, in the
absence of confirmed news of Hitler’s demise, was that there were
too many regime-loyalists, and too many waverers, with too much
to lose by committing themselves to the side of the conspirators.

Despite Stauffenberg’s intense avowals of Hitler’s death, the
depressing news for the conspirators of his survival gathered
strength. By mid-evening, it was increasingly obvious to the
insurrectionists that their coup had faltered beyond repair.

It rapidly became plain in Fuhrer Headquarters that the
assassination attempt was the signal for a military and political
insurrection against the regime. By mid-afternoon, Hitler had given
command of the reserve army to Himmler. And Keitel had informed
army districts that an attempt on the Fihrer’s life had been made,
but that he still lived, and on no account were orders from the
conspirators to be obeyed. Loyalists could be found even in the

Bendlerstrafse, the seat of the uprising. The communications officer
there, also in receipt of Keitel’s order, was by the evening, as the
conspirators were becoming more and more desperate, passing on
the message that the orders he was having to transmit on their
behalf were invalid. Fromm’s adjutants were meanwhile able to
spread the word in the building that Hitler was still alive, and to
collect together a number of officers prepared to challenge the
conspirators, whose already limited and hesitant support, inside and
outside Bendlerstrafge, was by now rapidly draining away. Early
instances where army units initially supported the coup dwindled
once news of Hitler’s survival hardened.

This was the case, too, in Paris. The military commander there,
General Karl Heinrich von Stiilpnagel, and his subordinate officers,
had firmly backed the insurrectionists. But the supreme commander
in the west, Field-Marshal von Kluge, vacillated as ever. In a vain
call from Berlin, Beck failed to persuade him to commit himself to
the rising. Once he learnt that the assassination attempt had failed,
Kluge countered Stiilpnagel’s orders to have the entire SS, SD, and
Gestapo in Paris arrested, dismissed the general, denounced his
actions to Keitel, and later congratulated Hitler on surviving a
treacherous attack on his life.

By this time, the events in Berlin had reached their denouement.
In the late morning, Goebbels had been hosting a speech about
Germany’s armaments position, attended by ministers, leading civil
servants, and industrialists, given by Speer in the Propaganda
Ministry. After he had closed the meeting, Goebbels had taken
Walther Funk and Albert Speer back with him into his study to talk
about mobilizing remaining resources within Germany. While they
were talking, he was suddenly called to take an urgent telephone
call from Fuhrer Headquarters. Despite the swift block on
communications, he had his own hot-line to FHQ, which, evidently,
still remained open. The call was from Press Chief Otto Dietrich,
who broke the news to Goebbels that there had been an attack on
Hitler’s life. This was within minutes of the explosion taking place.
There were few details at this stage, other than that Hitler was

alive. Goebbels, told that Organisation Todt workers had probably
been responsible, angrily reproached Speer about the evidently
over-casual security precautions that had been taken.

The Propaganda Minister was unusually quiet and pensive over
lunch. Somewhat remarkably, in the circumstances, he then retired
for his usual afternoon siesta. He was awakened between 2 and 3
p.m. by the head of his press office, Wilfried von Oven, who had
just taken a phone-call from an agitated Heinz Lorenz, Dietrich’s
deputy. Lorenz had dictated a brief text — drafted, he said, by Hitler
himself — for immediate radio transmission. Goebbels was little
taken with the terse wording, and remarked that urgency in
transmitting the news was less important than making sure it was
suitably couched for public consumption. He gave instructions to
prepare an adequately massaged commentary. At this stage, the
Propaganda Minister clearly had no idea of the gravity of the
situation, that army officers had been involved, and that an uprising
had been unleashed. Believing a breach of security had allowed
unreliable OT workers to perpetrate some attack, he had been told
that Hitler was alive. More than that he did not know. Even so, his
own behaviour after first hearing the news, and then during the
afternoon, when he attended to regular business and showed
unusual dilatoriness in putting out the broadcast urgently demanded
from Fuhrer Headquarters, was odd. Possibly he had decided that
any immediate crisis had passed, and that he would await further
information before putting out any press communiqué. More
probably, he was unsure of developments and wanted to hedge his
bets.

Eventually, after this lengthy interval, further news from the
Wolf’s Lair ended his inaction. He rang Speer and told him to drop
everything and rush over to his residence, close to the Brandenburg
Gate. There he told Speer he had heard from Ftthrer Headquarters
that a full-scale military putsch in the entire Reich was under way.
Speer immediately offered Goebbels his support in any attempt to
defeat and crush the uprising. Within minutes, Speer noticed armed
troops on the streets outside, ringing the building. By this time, it

was early evening, around 6.30 p.m. Goebbels took one glance and
disappeared into his bedroom, putting a little box of cyanide pills —
‘for all eventualities’ — into his pocket. The fact that he had been
unable to locate Himmler made him worried. Perhaps the
Reichsftihrer-SS had fallen into the hands of the putschists? Perhaps
he was even behind the coup? Suspicions were rife. The elimination
of such an important figure as Goebbels ought to have been a
priority for the conspirators. Amazingly, no one had even thought
to cut off his telephone. This, and the fact that the leaders of the
uprising had put out no proclamation over the radio, persuaded the
Propaganda Minister that all was not lost, even though he heard
disquieting reports of troops moving on Berlin.

The guard-battalion surrounding Goebbels’s house was under the
command of Major Otto Ernst Remer, thirty-two years old at the
time, a fanatical Hitler loyalist, who initially believed the fiction
constructed by the plotters that they were putting down a rising by
disaffected groups in the SS and party against the Fihrer. When
ordered by his superior, the Berlin City Commandant, Major-
General Paul von Hase, to take part in sealing off the government
quarter, Remer obeyed without demur. He soon became suspicious,
however, that what he had first heard was untrue; that he was, in
fact, helping suppress not a putsch of party and SS leaders against
Hitler, but a military coup against the regime by rebellious officers.
As luck had it, Lieutenant Hans Hagen, charged with inspiring Nazi
principles among the troops, had that afternoon lectured Remer’s
battalion on behalf of the Propaganda Ministry. Hagen now used his
fortuitous contact to Remer to help undermine the conspiracy
against Hitler. He persuaded Goebbels to speak directly to Remer,
to convince him of what was really happening, and to win him over.
Hagen then sought out Remer, played on the seeds of doubt in his
mind about the action in which he was engaged, and talked him into
disregarding the orders of his superior, Hase, and going to see
Goebbels. At this point, Remer was still unsure whether Goebbels
was part of an internal party coup against Hitler. If he made a

mistake, it could cost him his head. However, after some hesitation,
he agreed to meet the Propaganda Minister.

Goebbels reminded him of his oath to the Fuhrer. Remer
expressed his loyalty to Hitler and the party, but remarked that the
Fuhrer was dead. ‘The Fuhrer is alive!’ Goebbels retorted. ‘I spoke
with him only a few minutes ago.’ The uncertain Remer was visibly
wavering. Goebbels offered to let Remer speak himself with Hitler.
It was around 7 p.m. Within minutes, the call to the Wolf ’s Lair
was made. Hitler asked Remer whether he recognized his voice.
Standing rigidly to attention, Remer said he did. ‘Do you hear me?
So I’m alive! The attempt has failed,’ he registered Hitler saying. ‘A
tiny clique of ambitious officers wanted to do away with me. But
now we have the saboteurs of the front. We’ll make short shrift of
this plague. You are commissioned by me with the task of
immediately restoring calm and security in the Reich capital, if
necessary by force. You are under my personal command for this
purpose until the Reichsftihrer-SS arrives in the Reich capital!’
Remer needed no further persuasion. All Speer, in the room at the
time, could hear, was ‘Jawohl, my Fuhrer ... Jawohl, as you order,
my Fuhrer.’ Remer was put in charge of security in Berlin to replace
Hase. He was to follow all instructions from Goebbels.

Remer arranged for Goebbels to speak to his men. Goebbels
addressed the guard-battalion in the garden of his residence around
8.30 p.m., and rapidly won them over. Almost two hours earlier, he
had put out a radio communiqué telling listeners of the attack on
Hitler, but how the Fithrer had suffered only minor abrasions, had
received Mussolini that afternoon, and was already back at his
work. For those still wavering, the news of Hitler’s survival was a
vital piece of information. Between 8 and 9 p.m. the cordon around
the government quarter was lifted. The guard-battalion was by now
needed for other duties: rooting out the conspirators in their
headquarters in Bendlerstrafge. The high-point of the conspiracy had
passed. For the plotters, the writing was on the wall.

Some were already seeking to extricate themselves even before
Goebbels’s communiqué broadcast the news of Hitler’s survival. By
mid-evening, the group of conspirators in the Bendlerblock, the
Wehrmacht High Command building in the Bendlerstrafge, were as
good as all that was left of the uprising. Remer’s guard-battalion
was surrounding the building. Panzer units loyal to the regime were
closing in on Berlin’s city centre. Troop commanders were no longer
prepared to listen to the plotters’ orders. Even in the Bendlerblock
itself, senior officers were refusing to take orders from the
conspirators, reminding them of the oath they had taken to Hitler
which, since the radio had broadcast news of his survival, was still
valid.

A group of staff officers, dissatisfied with Olbricht’s increasingly
lame explanation of what was happening, and, whatever their
feelings towards Hitler, not unnaturally anxious in the light of an
evidently lost cause to save their own skins, became rebellious.
Soon after 9 p.m., arming themselves, they returned to Olbricht’s
room. While their spokesman, Lieutenant-Colonel Franz Herber,
was talking to Olbricht, shots were fired in the corridor, one of
which hit Stauffenberg in the shoulder. It was a brief flurry, no
more. Herber and his men pressed into Fromm’s office, where
Colonel-General Hoepner, the conspirators’ choice as commander of
the reserve army, Mertz, Beck, Haeften, and the injured
Stauffenberg also gathered. Herber demanded to speak to Fromm
and was told he was still in his apartment (where he had been kept
under guard since the afternoon). One of the rebel officers
immediately made his way there, was admitted, and told Fromm
what had happened. The guard outside Fromm’s door had by now
vanished. Liberated, Fromm returned to his office to confront the
putschists. It was around 10 p.m. when his massive frame appeared
in the doorway of his office. He scornfully cast his eye over the
utterly dispirited leaders of the insurrection. ‘So, gentlemen,’ he
declared, ‘now I’m going to do to you what you did to me this
afternoon.’

What the conspirators had done to Fromm had been to lock him
in his room and give him sandwiches and wine. Fromm was less
naive. He had his neck to save — or so he thought. He told the
putschists they were under arrest and demanded they surrender all
weapons. Beck asked to retain his ‘for private use’. Fromm ordered
him to make use of it immediately. Beck said at that moment he
was thinking of earlier days. Fromm urged him to get on with it.
Beck put the gun to his head, but succeeded only in grazing himself
on the temple. Fromm offered the others a few moments should
they wish to write any last words. Hoepner availed himself of the
opportunity, sitting at Olbricht’s desk; so did Olbricht himself. Beck,
meanwhile, reeling from the glancing blow to his head, refused
attempts to take the pistol from him, and insisted on being allowed
another shot. Even then, he only managed a severe head-wound.
With Beck writhing on the floor, Fromm left the room to learn that
a unit of the guard-battalion had entered the courtyard of the
Bendlerblock. He knew, too, that Himmler, the newly appointed
commander of the reserve army, was on his way. There was no time
to lose. He returned to his room after five minutes and announced
that he had held a court-martial in the name of the Ftihrer. Mertz,
Olbricht, Haeften, and ‘this colonel whose name I will no longer
mention’ had been sentenced to death. ‘Take a few men and execute
this sentence downstairs in the yard at once,’ he ordered an officer
standing by. Stauffenberg tried to take all responsibility on his own
shoulders, stating that the others had been merely carrying out his
orders. Fromm said nothing, as the four men were taken to their
execution, and Hoepner - initially also earmarked for execution, but
spared for the time being following a private discussion with
Fromm - was led out into captivity. With a glance at the dying
Beck, Fromm commanded one of the officers to finish him off. The
former Chief of the General Staff was unceremoniously dragged into
the adjacent room and shot dead.

The condemned men were rapidly escorted downstairs into the
courtyard, where a firing-squad of ten men drawn from the guard-
battalion was already waiting. To add to the macabre scene, the

drivers of the vehicles parked in the courtyard had been ordered to
turn their headlights on the little pile of sand near the doorway
from which Stauffenberg and his fellow-conspirators emerged.
Without ceremony, Olbricht was put on the sand-heap and promptly
shot. Next to be brought forward was Stauffenberg. Just as the
execution-squad opened fire, Haeften threw himself in front of
Stauffenberg, and died first. It was to no avail. Stauffenberg was
immediately placed again on the sand-heap. As the shots rang out,
he was heard to cry: ‘Long live holy Germany.’ Seconds later, the
execution of the last of the four, Mertz von Quirnheim, followed.
Fromm at once had a telegram dispatched, announcing the bloody
suppression of the attempted coup and the execution of the
ringleaders. Then he gave an impassioned address to those
assembled in the courtyard, attributing Hitler’s wondrous salvation
to the work of Providence. He ended with a three-fold ‘Sieg Heil’ to
the Ftihrer.

While the bodies of the executed men, along with Beck’s corpse,
which had been dragged downstairs into the yard, were taken off in
a lorry to be buried — next day Himmler had them exhumed and
cremated — the remaining conspirators in the Bendlerblock were
arrested. It was around half an hour after midnight.

Apart from the lingering remnants of the coup in Paris, Prague,
and Vienna, and apart from the terrible and inevitable reprisals to
follow, the last attempt to topple Hitler and his regime from within
was over.

Hours earlier on this eventful 20 July 1944, shortly after arriving
back in his bunker following the explosion, Hitler had refused to
contemplate cancelling the planned visit of the Duce, scheduled for
2.30 p.m. that afternoon, but delayed half an hour because of the
late arrival of Mussolini’s train. It was to prove the last of the
seventeen meetings of the two dictators. It was certainly the
strangest. Outwardly composed, there was little to denote that

Hitler had just escaped an attempt on his life. He greeted Mussolini
with his left hand, since he had difficulty in raising his injured right
arm. He told the shocked Duce what had happened, then led him to
the ruined wooden hut where the explosion had taken place. In a
macabre scene, amid the devastation, accompanied only by the
interpreter, Paul Schmidt, Hitler described to his fellow-dictator
where he had stood, right arm leaning on the table as he studied the
map, when the bomb went off. He showed him the singed hair at
the back of his head. Hitler sat down on an upturned box. Schmidt
found a still usable stool amid the debris for Mussolini. For a few
moments, neither dictator said a word. Then Hitler, in a quiet voice,
said: ‘When I go through it all again ... I conclude from my
wondrous salvation, while others present in the room received
serious injuries ... that nothing is going to happen to me.’ He was
ever more convinced, he added, that it was given to him to lead
their common cause to a victorious end.

The same theme, that Providence had saved him, ran through
Hitler’s address transmitted by all radio stations soon after
midnight. Hitler said he was speaking to the German people for two
reasons: to let them hear his voice, and know that he was uninjured
and well; and to tell them about a crime without parallel in German
history. ‘A tiny clique of ambitious, unconscionable, and at the same
time criminal, stupid officers has forged a plot to eliminate me and
at the same time to eradicate with me the staff practically of the
German armed forces’ leadership.’ He likened it to the stab-in-the-
back of 1918. But this time, the ‘tiny gang of criminal elements’
would be ‘mercilessly eradicated’. On three separate occasions he
referred to his survival as ‘a sign of Providence that I must continue
my work, and therefore will continue it’.

In fact, as so often in his life, it had not been Providence that had
saved him, but luck: the luck of the devil.

26
No Way Out

‘Now I finally have the swine who have been sabotaging my work
for years,’ raged Hitler as details of the plot against him started to
emerge. ‘Now I have proof: the entire General Staff is
contaminated.’ His long-standing, deep-seated distrust of his army
leaders had found its confirmation. It suddenly seemed blindingly
obvious to him why his military plans had encountered such
setbacks: they had been sabotaged throughout by the treachery of
his army officers. ‘Now I know why all my great plans in Russia had
to fail in recent years,’ he ranted. ‘It was all treason! But for those
traitors, we would have won long ago. Here is my justification
before history’ (an indication, too, that Hitler was consciously
looking to his place in the pantheon of Teutonic heroes). Goebbels,
as so often, echoed Hitler’s sentiments. ‘The generals are not
opposed to the Filhrer because we are experiencing crises at the
front,’ he entered in his diary. ‘Rather, we are experiencing crises at
the front because the generals are opposed to the Ftihrer.’ Hitler
was convinced of an ‘inner blood-poisoning’. With leading positions
occupied by traitors bent on destroying the Reich, he railed, with
key figures such as General Eduard Wagner (responsible as
Quartermaster-General for army supplies) and General Erich
Fellgiebel (chief of signals operations at Filhrer Headquarters)
connected to the conspiracy, it was no wonder that German military
tactics had been known in advance by the Red Army. It had been
‘permanent treachery’ all along. It was symptomatic of an
underlying ‘crisis in morale’. Action ought to have been taken
sooner. It had been known, after all, for one and a half years that

there were traitors in the army. But now, an end had to be made.
‘These most base creatures to have worn the soldier’s uniform in the
whole of history, this rabble which has preserved itself from bygone
times, must be got rid of and driven out.’ Military recovery would
follow recovery from the crisis in morale. It would be ‘Germany’s
salvation’.

Vengeance was uppermost in Hitler’s mind. There would be no
mercy in the task of cleansing the Augean stables. Swift and ruthless
action would be taken. He would ‘wipe out and eradicate’ the lot of
them, he raged. ‘These criminals’ would not be granted an
honourable soldier’s execution by firing-squad. They would be
expelled from the Wehrmacht, brought as civilians before the court,
and executed within two hours of sentence. “They must hang
immediately, without any mercy,’ he declared. He gave orders to
set up a military ‘Court of Honour’, in which senior generals
(including among others Keitel, Rundstedt — who presided — and
Guderian) would expel in disgrace those found to have been
involved in the plot. Those subsequently sentenced to death by the
People’s Court, he ordered, were to be hanged in prison clothing as
criminals. He spoke favourably of Stalin’s purges of his officers.
‘The Fuhrer is extraordinarily furious at the generals, especially
those of the General Staff,’ noted Goebbels after seeing Hitler on 22
July. ‘He is absolutely determined to set a bloody example and to
eradicate a freemasons’ lodge which has been opposed to us all the
time and has only awaited the moment to stab us in the back in the
most critical hour. The punishment which must now be meted out
has to have historic dimensions.’

Hitler had been outraged at Colonel-General Fromm’s peremptory
action in having Stauffenberg and the other leaders of the attempted
coup immediately executed by firing-squad. He gave orders
forthwith that other plotters captured should appear before the
People’s Court. The President of the People’s Court, Roland Freisler,
a fanatical Nazi who, despite early sympathies with the radical Left,
had been ideologically committed to the volkisch cause since the
early 1920s, saw himself — a classical instance of ‘working towards

the Fithrer’ — as pronouncing judgement as the ‘Fithrer would judge
the case himself’. The People’s Court was, for him, expressly a
‘political court’. Under his presidency, the number of death
sentences delivered by the court had risen from 102 in 1941 to
2,097 in 1944. It was little wonder that he had already gained
notoriety as a ‘hanging judge’. Recapitulating Hitler’s comments at
their recent meeting, Goebbels remarked that those implicated in
the plot were to be brought before the People’s Court ‘and
sentenced to death’. Freisler, he added, ‘would find the right tone to
deal with them’. Hitler himself was keen above all that the
conspirators should be permitted ‘no time for long speeches’ during
their defence. ‘But Freisler will see to that,’ he added. “That’s our
Vyschinsky’ — a reference to Stalin’s notorious prosecutor in the
show-trials of the 1930s.

It took little encouragement from Goebbels to persuade Hitler
that Fromm, Stauffenberg’s direct superior officer, had acted so
swiftly in an attempt to cover up his own complicity. Fromm had, in
fact, already been named by Bormann in a circular to the Gauleiter
in mid-evening of 20 July as one of those to be arrested as part of
the ‘reactionary gang of criminals’ behind the conspiracy. Following
the suppression of the coup in the Bendlerblock and the swift
execution of Stauffenberg, Olbricht, Haeften, and Mertz von
Quirnheim, Fromm had made his way to the Propaganda Ministry,
wanting to speak on the telephone with Hitler. Instead of
connecting him, Goebbels had had Fromm seated in another room
while he himself telephoned Ftthrer Headquarters. He soon had the
decision he wanted. Goebbels immediately had the former
Commander-in-Chief of the Reserve Army placed under armed
guard. After months of imprisonment, a mockery of a trial before
the People’s Court, and a trumped-up conviction on grounds of
alleged cowardice — despite the less-than-heroic motive of self-
preservation that had dictated his role on centre-stage in the
Bendlerblock on 20 July, he was no coward — Fromm would
eventually die at the hands of a firing-squad in March 1945.

In the confusion in the Bendlerblock late on the night of 20 July,
it had looked for a time as if other executions would follow those of
the coup’s leaders (together with the assisted suicide of Beck). But
the arrival soon after midnight of an SS unit under the command of
Sturmbannfiihrer Otto Skorzeny — the rescuer of Mussolini from
captivity the previous summer — along with the appearance at the
scene of SD chief Ernst Kaltenbrunner and Major Otto Ernst Remer,
newly appointed commander of the Berlin guards battalion and
largely responsible for putting down the coup, blocked further
summary executions and ended the upheaval. Meanwhile, Himmler
himself had flown to Berlin and, in his new temporary capacity as
Commander-in-Chief of the Reserve Army, had given orders that no
further independent action was to be taken against officers held in
suspicion.

Shortly before 4 a.m., Bormann was able to inform the party’s
provincial chieftains, the Gauleiter, that the putsch was at an end.
By then, those arrested in the Bendlerstrafge — including
Stauffenberg’s brother, Berthold, former senior civil-servant and
deputy Police President of Berlin Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg,
leading member of the Kreisau Circle Peter Graf Yorck von
Wartenburg, Protestant pastor Eugen Gerstenmaier, and landholder
and officer in the Abwehr Ulrich Wilhelm Graf Schwerin von
Schwanenfeld — had been led off to await their fate. Former
Colonel-General Erich Hoepner, arrested by Fromm but not
executed, and Field-Marshal Erwin von Witzleben, who had left the
Bendlerstrafgse before the collapse of the coup, were also promptly
taken into custody, along with a number of others who had been
implicated. Prussian Finance Minister Popitz, former Economics
Minister Schacht, former Chief of Staff Colonel-General Halder,
Major-General Stieff, and, from the Abwehr, Admiral Canaris and
Major-General Oster were also swiftly arrested. Major Hans Ulrich
von Oertzen, liaison officer for the Berlin Defence District
(Wehrkreis III), who had given out the first ‘Valkyrie’ orders, blew
himself up with a hand-grenade. Major-General Henning von
Tresckow, the early driving-force behind the attempts to assassinate

Hitler, killed himself in similar fashion at the front near Ostrov in
Poland. General Wagner shot himself. General Fellgiebel refused to
do so. ‘You stand your ground, you don’t do that,’ he told his aide-
de-camp. Well aware that his arrest was imminent, he spent much
of the afternoon, remarkably, at the Wolf ’s Lair, even
congratulated Hitler on his survival, and awaited his inevitable fate.

Those who fell into the clutches of the Gestapo had to reckon
with fearsome torture. It was endured for the most part with the
idealism, even heroism, which had sustained them throughout their
perilous opposition. In the early stages of their investigations, the
Gestapo managed to squeeze out remarkably limited information,
beyond what they already knew, from those they so grievously
maltreated. Even so, as the ‘Special Commission, 20 July’, set up on
the day after the attempted coup, expanded its investigations, the
numbers arrested rapidly swelled to 600 persons. Almost all the
leading figures in the various branches of the conspiracy were
rapidly captured, though Goerdeler held out under cover until 12
August. Reports reached Hitler daily of new names of those
implicated. His early belief that it had been no more than a ‘tiny
clique’ of officers which had opposed him had proved mistaken. The
conspiracy had tentacles stretching further than he could have
imagined. He was particularly incensed that even Graf Helldorf,
Berlin Police President, ‘Old Fighter’ of the Nazi Movement, and a
former SA leader, turned out to have been deeply implicated. As the
list lengthened, and the extent of the conspiracy became clear,
Hitler’s fury and bitter resentment against the conservatives —
especially the landed aristocracy — who had never fully accepted
him mounted. ‘We wiped out the class struggle on the Left, but
unfortunately forgot to finish off the class struggle on the Right,’ he
was heard to remark. But now was the worst possible time to
encourage divisiveness within the people; the general showdown
with the aristocracy would have to wait till the war was over.

On 7 August, the intended show-trials began at the People’s Court
in Berlin. The first eight — including Witzleben, Hoepner, Stieff, and
Yorck — of what became a regular procession of the accused were

each marched by two policemen into a courtroom bedecked with
swastikas, holding around 300 selected spectators (including the
journalists hand-picked by Goebbels). There they had to endure the
ferocious wrath, scathing contempt, and ruthless humiliation heaped
on them by the red-robed president of the court, Judge Roland
Freisler. Seated beneath a bust of Hitler, Freisler’s face reflected in
its contortions extremes of hatred and derision. He presided over no
more than a base mockery of any semblance of a legal trial, with
the death-sentence a certainty from the outset. The accused men
bore visible signs of their torment in prison. To degrade them even
in physical appearance, they were shabbily dressed, without collars
and ties, and were handcuffed until seated in the courtroom.
Witzleben was even deprived of braces or a belt, so that he had to
hold up his trousers with one hand. The accused were not allowed
to express themselves properly or explain their motivation before
Freisler cut them short, bawling insults, calling them knaves,
traitors, cowardly murderers. The order had been given — probably
by Goebbels, though undoubtedly with Hitler’s authorization — for
the court proceedings to be filmed with a view to showing extracts
in the newsreels as well as in a ‘documentary’ entitled ‘Traitors
before the People’s Court’. So loudly did Freisler shout that the
cameramen had to inform him that he was ruining their sound
recordings. Nevertheless, the accused managed some moments of
courageous defiance. For instance, after the death sentence had
predictably been pronounced, General Fellgiebel uttered: ‘Then
hurry with the hanging, Mr President; otherwise you will hang
earlier than we.’ And Field-Marshal von Witzleben called out: ‘You
can hand us over to the hangman. In three months the enraged and
tormented people will call you to account, and will drag you alive
through the muck of the street.’ Such a black farce were the trials
that even Reich Justice Minister Otto Georg Thierack, himself a
fanatical Nazi who in his ideological ardour had by this time
surrendered practically the last vestiges of a completely perverted
legal system to the arbitrary police lawlessness of the SS,
subsequently complained about Freisler’s conduct.

Once the verdicts had been pronounced, the condemned men
were taken off, many of them to Plotzensee Prison in Berlin. On
Hitler’s instructions they were denied any last rites or pastoral care
(though this callous order was at least partially bypassed in
practice). The normal mode of execution for civilian capital offences
in the Third Reich was beheading. But Hitler had reportedly ordered
that he wanted those behind the conspiracy of 20 July 1944
‘hanged, hung up like meat-carcasses’. In the small, single-storey
execution room, with whitewashed walls, divided by a black
curtain, hooks, indeed like meat-hooks, had been placed on a rail
just below the ceiling. Usually, the only light in the room came
from two windows, dimly revealing a frequently used guillotine.
Now, however, certainly for the first groups of conspirators being
led to their doom, the executions were to be filmed and
photographed, and the macabre scene was illuminated with bright
lights, like a film studio. On a small table in the corner of the room
stood a table with a bottle of cognac — for the executioners, not to
steady the nerves of the victims. The condemned men were led in,
handcuffed and wearing prison trousers. There were no last words,
no comfort from a priest or pastor; nothing but the black humour of
the hangman. Eye-witness accounts speak of the steadfastness and
dignity of those executed. The hanging was carried out within
twenty seconds of the prisoner entering the room. Death was not,
however, immediate. Sometimes it came quickly; in other cases, the
agony was slow -— lasting more than twenty minutes. In an added
gratuitous obscenity, some of the condemned men had their trousers
pulled down by their executioners before they died. And all the time
the camera whirred. The photographs and grisly film were taken to
Fuhrer Headquarters. Speer later reported seeing a pile of such
photographs lying on Hitler’s map-table when he visited the Wolf’s
Lair on 18 August. SS-men and some civilians, he added, went into a
viewing of the executions in the cinema that evening, though they
were not joined by any members of the Wehrmacht. Whether Hitler
saw the film of the executions is uncertain; the testimony is
contradictory.

Most of the executions connected with the attempted coup of 20
July 1944 followed within the next weeks. Some took place only
months later. By the time the blood-letting subsided, the death-toll
of those directly implicated numbered around 200. But it was
Hitler’s last triumph.

The Stauffenberg plot left its lasting mark on him. The injuries he
had suffered in the bomb blast had been, as we saw, relatively
superficial. As if to emphasize his own indestructibility and his
manliness in surmounting pain, he made light of his injuries and
even joked about them to his entourage. But they were less trivial
than Hitler himself implied. Blood was still seeping through the
bandages from the skin wounds almost a fortnight after the bomb-
attack. He suffered sharp pain in especially the right ear, and his
hearing was impaired. He was treated by Dr Erwin Giesing, an ear,
nose, and throat specialist in a nearby hospital, then by Professor
Karl von Eicken, who had removed a throat polyp in 1935 and was
now flown in from Berlin. But the ruptured eardrums, the worst
injury, continued bleeding for days, and took several weeks to heal.
He thought for some time that his right ear would never recover.
The disturbance to his balance from the inner-ear injuries made his
eyes turn to the right and gave him a tendency to lean rightwards
when he walked. There was also frequent dizziness and malaise. His
blood pressure was too high. He looked aged, ill, and strained.
Eleven days after the attack on his life, he told those present at the
daily military briefing that he was unfit to speak in public for the
time being; he could not stand up for long, feared a sudden attack
of dizziness, and was also worried about not walking straight. A few
weeks later, Hitler admitted to his doctor, Morell, that the weeks
since the bomb-attack had been ‘the worst of his life’ —- adding that
he had mastered the difficulties ‘with a heroism no German could
dream of’. Strangely, the trembling in Hitler’s left leg and hands
practically disappeared following the blast. Morell attributed it to
the nervous shock. By mid-September, however, the tremor had
returned. By this time, the heavy daily doses of pills and injections

could do nothing to head off the long-term deterioration in Hitler’s
health. At least as serious were the psychological effects.

His sense of distrust and betrayal now reached paranoid levels.
Outward precautions were swiftly taken. Security was at once
massively tightened at Fuhrer Headquarters. At military briefings,
all personnel were from now on thoroughly searched for weapons
and explosives. Hitler’s food and medicines were tested for poison.
Any presents of foodstuffs, such as chocolates or caviar (which he
was fond of ), were immediately destroyed. But the outward
security measures could do nothing to alter the deep shock that
some of his own generals had turned against him. According to
Guderian, whom he appointed as successor to Zeitzler as Chief of
the Army General Staff within hours of Stauffenberg’s bomb
exploding, ‘he believed no one any more. It had already been
difficult enough dealing with him; it now became a torture that
grew steadily worse from month to month. He frequently lost all
self-control and his language grew increasingly violent. In his
intimate circle he now found no restraining influence.’

In 1918, according to his distorted vision of the momentous
weeks of defeat and revolution, enemies from within had stabbed in
the back those fighting at the front. His entire life in politics had
been aimed at reversing that disaster, and in eliminating any
possible repetition in a new war. Now, a new variant of such
treachery had emerged — led, this time, not by Marxist subversives
at home threatening the military effort, but by officers of the
Wehrmacht who had come close to undermining the war-effort on
the home front. Suspicion had always been deeply embedded in
Hitler’s nature. But the events of 20 July now transformed the
underlying suspicion into the most visceral belief in treachery and
betrayal all around him in the army, aimed once more at stabbing in
the back a nation engaged in a titanic struggle for its very survival.

Alongside the thirsting for brutal revenge, the failed bomb-plot
gave a further mighty boost to Hitler’s sense of walking with
destiny. With ‘Providence’ on his side, as he imagined, his survival
was to him the guarantee that he would fulfil his historic mission. It

intensified the descent into pure messianism. “These criminals who
wanted to do away with me have no idea what would have
happened to the German people,’ Hitler told his secretaries. “They
don’t know the plans of our enemies, who want to annihilate
Germany so that it can never arise again. If they think that the
western powers are strong enough without Germany to hold
Bolshevism in check, they are deceiving themselves. This war must
be won by us. Otherwise Europe will be lost to Bolshevism. And I
will see to it that no one else can hold me back or eliminate me. I
am the only one who knows the danger, and the only one who can
prevent it.’ Such sentiments were redolent, through a distorting
mirror, of the Wagnerian redeemer-figure, a hero who alone could
save the holders of the Grail, indeed the world itself, from disaster —
a latter-day Parsifal.

But, once more looking to his own place in history, and to the
reasons why the path of destiny had led to mounting tragedy for
Germany, instead of glorious victory, he found a further reason,
beyond the treachery of his generals: the weakness of the people. If
Speer can be believed, Hitler gave at this time an intimation that
the German people might not deserve him, might have proved
weak, have failed its test before history, and thus be condemned to
destruction. It was one of the few hints, whether in public or in
private, amid the continued outpourings of optimism about the
outcome of the war, that Hitler indeed contemplated, even
momentarily, the possibility of total defeat.

Whatever the positive gloss he instinctively and insistently placed
upon news of the latest setbacks as he continued to play the role of
Fuhrer to perfection, he was not devoid of understanding for the
significance of the successful landing of the western Allies in
Normandy, the dramatic collapse of the eastern front which left the
Red Army in striking distance of the borders of the Reich itself, the
ceaseless bombing that the Luftwaffe was powerless to prevent, the
overwhelming Allied superiority in weaponry and raw materials,
and gloomy reports of a mounting, critical fuel shortage. Kluge and
Rommel had both urged Hitler to end the war which he could not

win. But he continued to dismiss out of hand all talk of suing for
peace. The situationwas ‘not yet ripe for a political solution’, he
declared. ‘To hope for a favourable political moment to do
something during a time of severe military defeats is naturally
childish and naive,’ he went on, during the military briefing session
with his generals on 31 August 1944. ‘Such moments can present
themselves when you have successes.’ But where were the successes
likely to materialize? All he could point to was a feeling of certainty
that at some point the Allied coalition would break down under the
weight of its inner tensions. It was a matter of waiting for that
moment, however tough the situation was.

‘My task has been,’ he continued, ‘especially since 1941 under no
circumstances to lose my nerve.’ He lived, he said, just to carry out
this struggle since he knew that it it could only be won through a
will of iron. Instead of spreading this iron will, the General Staff
officers had undermined it, disseminating nothing but pessimism.
But the fight would continue, if necessary even on the Rhine. He
once more evoked one of his great heroes of history. ‘We will under
all circumstances carry on the struggle until, as Frederick the Great
said, one of our damned opponents is tired of fighting any longer,
and until we get a peace which secures the existence of the German
nation for the next fifty or a hundred years and’ — he was back at a
central obsession — ‘which, above all, does not defile our honour a
second time, as happened in 1918.’ This thought brought him
directly to the bomb plot, and to his own survival. ‘Fate could have
taken a different turn,’ he continued, adding with some pathos: ‘If
my life had been ended, it would have been for me personally, I
might say, only a liberation from worries, sleepless nights, and
severe nervous strain. In a mere fraction of a second you're freed
from all that and have rest and your eternal peace. For the fact that
I’m still alive, I nevertheless have to thank Providence.’

They were somewhat rambling thoughts. But they were plain
enough in meaning: a negotiated peace could not be considered
except from a position of strength (which was in realistic terms
unimaginable); the only hope was to hold out until the Allied

coalition collapsed (but time, and the crass imbalance of material
resources, were scarcely on Germany’s side); his historic role, as he
saw it, was to eradicate any possibility of a second capitulation on
the lines of that of November 1918; he alone stood between
Germany and calamity; but suicide would bring release for him
(whatever the consequences for the German people) within a split
second. In Hitler’s extraordinary perspective, his historic task was to
continue the fight to the point of utter destruction — and even self-
destruction — in order to prevent another ‘November 1918’ and to
erase the memory of that ‘disgrace’ for the nation. It was a task of
infinitely greater honour than negotiating a peace from weakness —
something which would bring new shame on himself and the
German people. It amounted to scarcely less than a realization that
the time for a last stand was approaching, and that no holds would
be barred in a struggle likely to end in oblivion, where the only
remaining monumental vision was the quest for historical greatness
— even if Reich and people should go down in flames in the process.

This meant in turn that there was no way out. The failure of the
conspiracy to remove Hitler took away the last opportunity of a
negotiated end to the war. The horrors of a war which Germany had
inflicted on the rest of Europe were rebounding — if, even now, in
far milder form — on to the Reich itself. With internal resistance
crushed, and a leadership unable to bring victory, incapable of
staving off defeat, and unwilling to attempt to find peace, only total
military destruction could bring a release.

For Hitler’s countless victims throughout Europe, the human
misery had, in fact, still not reached its peak. It would rise in
crescendo in the months still to come.

The institutional pillars of the regime — the Wehrmacht, the party,
ministries of state, and the SS-controlled security apparatus —
remained intact in the second half of 1944. And Hitler, the keystone
bonding the regime’s structure together, was still, paradoxically,

indispensable to its survival while — by now even in the eyes of
some close to the leadership — at the same time driving Germany
inexorably towards perdition. The predictable rallying round Hitler
following the July assassination attempt could not for long conceal
the fact that the regime’s edifice was beginning to crumble as the
Nazi empire throughout Europe shrivelled and the increasing
certainty of a lost war made even some of those who had gained
most from Nazism start looking for possible exit-routes. The
aftermath of the bomb-plot saw the regime enter its most radical
phase. But it was a radicalism that mirrored an increasingly
desperate regime’s reaction to internal as well as external crisis.

Hitler’s own obvious reaction in the wake of the shock of
Stauffenberg’s bomb had been to turn to his firm loyalist base, the
party leadership, and to his most long-standing and trusted band of
paladins. In the backs-to-the-wall atmosphere of the last months, the
party was to play a more dominant role than at any time since the
‘seizure of power’, invoking the overcoming of adversity in the
‘time of struggle’, attempting to instil the ‘fighting spirit of National
Socialism’ throughout the entire people in the increasingly vain
attempt to combat overwhelming Allied arms and material
superiority by little more than fanatical will-power.

As had invariably been the case in a crisis, Hitler had lost no time
following the attempted coup on 20 July in ensuring the continued
loyalty of the Gauleiter, the party’s provincial chieftains. Among
them were some who had been among his most dependable
lieutenants for close on two decades. Collectively, the Gauleiter
constituted now, as before, a vital prop of his rule. His provincial
viceroys were now, their party positions enhanced through their
extensive powers as Reich Defence Commissars, his insurance
against any prospect of army-led unrest or possible insurrection in
the regions. Increasingly over the next months, as the threads of
state administration started to fray and ultimately fell apart, the
party chieftains — especially those who acted as Reich Defence
Commissars in their regions — were decisive in holding together in
the provinces what was left of Nazi rule.

Extended scope for propaganda, mobilization, and tightened
control over the population — the overriding tasks of the party as
most people looked beyond the end of the regime and looming
military defeat into an uncertain future — fell to the Reich Defence
Commissars in the last desperate drive to maximize resources for
‘total war’. The shortages of available men to be sent to the front,
and workers for the armaments industries, had mounted alarmingly
throughout the first half of 1944. Hitler’s authorization in January
to Fritz Sauckel, Plenipotentiary for Labour Deployment, to make
up the manpower shortages through forced labour extracted from
the occupied territories, while at the same time according Speer
protection for the labour employed in his armaments plants in
France, had done nothing to resolve the difficulty and merely
sharpened the conflict between Sauckel and Speer. Apart from
Speer, the SS, the Wehrmacht, and the party had also proved adept
at preventing any inroads into their personnel. Bormann had even
presided over a 51 per cent increase in the number of ‘reserved
occupations’, exempt from call-up, in the party administration
between May 1943 and June 1944.

Meanwhile, the labour shortage had been greatly magnified
through the double military disaster in June of the Allied landing in
Normandy and the Red Army’s devastating offensive on the eastern
front. This had prompted Goebbels and Speer to link their efforts to
persuade Hitler to agree to a drastic radicalization of the ‘home
front’ to comb out all remaining manpower for the war effort. Both
had sent him lengthy memoranda in mid-July, promising huge
labour savings to tide over the situation until new weaponry
became available and the anti-German coalition broke up. But
before the Stauffenberg bomb, Hitler had, as we noted, shown little
readiness to comply with their radical demands. Whatever the
accompanying rhetoric, and the undoubted feeling (which
Goebbels’s own propaganda had helped feed) among the
underprivileged that many of the better-off were still able to escape
the burdens of war, and were not pulling their weight in the
national cause, such demands were bound to be unpopular in many

circles, antagonize powerful vested interests, and also convey an
impression of desperation. And, as the state administration rushed
to point out, the gains might well be less than impressive; only one
in twelve of those in the civil service who had not been called up
was under forty-three, and more than two-thirds were over fifty-
five years old.

Hitler had told his Propaganda Minister as recently as June that
the time was not ripe for ‘a big appeal to total war in the true
meaning of the word’, that the crises would be surmounted ‘in the
usual way’, but that he would be ready to introduce ‘wholly
abnormal measures’ should ‘more serious crises take place’. Hitler’s
change of mind, directly following the failed assassination attempt,
in deciding to grant Goebbels the new authority he had coveted, as
Reich Plenipotentiary for the Total War Effort, was a tacit
admission that the regime was faced with a more fundamental crisis
than ever before.

Goebbels’s decisive action to put down the uprising on 20 July
unquestionably weighed heavily in his favour when Hitler looked
for the man to supervise the radicalization of the home front. And
where before he had faced a hesitant Hitler, he was now pushing at
an open door in his demands for draconian measures. The decision
had in effect already been taken when, at a meeting of ministerial
representatives along with some other leading figures in the regime
two days after Stauffenberg’s assassination attempt, head of the
Reich Chancellery Lammers proposed the bestowing of wide-
ranging powers on the Propaganda Minister to bring about the
reform of the state and public life. Himmler was given extensive
complementary powers at the same time to reorganize the
Wehrmacht and comb out all remaining manpower. The following
day, 23 July, the regime’s leaders, now joined by Goring, assembled
at the Wolf ’s Lair, where Hitler himself, heavily leaning on
Goebbels’s memorandum of the previous week, confirmed the new
role of the Propaganda Minister. Hitler demanded ‘something
fundamental’ if the war were still to be won. Massive reserves were
available, he claimed, but had not been deployed. This would now

have to be done without respect to person, position, or office. He
pointed to the party in the early days, which had achieved ‘the
greatest historic success’ with only a simple administrative
apparatus. Goebbels noted with interest the change in Hitler’s views
since their previous meeting a month or so earlier. The assassination
attempt and the events on the eastern front had produced clarity in
his decisions, Goebbels noted in his diary. To his own staff, the
Propaganda Minister laconically remarked that ‘it takes a bomb
under his arse to make Hitler see reason’.

Goebbels relished his moment of triumph. He appeared to have
finally achieved what he had desired for so long: control over the
‘home front’ with ‘the most extensive plenipotentiary powers ...
that have up to now been granted in the National Socialist Reich’,
with rights — the decisive factor in his view — to issue directives to
ministers and the highest-ranking governmental authorities. To his
staff, he spoke of having ‘practically full dictatorial powers’ within
the Reich.

However, nothing was ever quite what it seemed in the Third
Reich. The decree itself limited Goebbels’s powers in some respects.
He could issue directives to the ‘highest Reich authorities’. But only
they could issue any consequential decrees and ordinances. And
these had to be agreed with Lammers, Bormann, and Himmler (in
the capacity he had adopted when becoming Interior Minister, as
Plenipotentiary for Reich Administration). Any directives related to
the party itself had to have Bormann’s support (and, behind
Bormann, to correspond with Hitler’s own wishes). Unresolved
objections to Goebbels’s directives had to pass to Lammers for
Hitler’s own final decision. Beyond the wording of the decree itself,
Hitler let Goebbels know that those authorities directly responsible
to him — those involved in the rebuilding plans for Berlin, Munich,
and Linz, his motor-vehicle staff, and the personnel of the Reich
Chancellery, Presidential Chancellery, and Party Chancellery — were
also excluded from the directives. The Wehrmacht, its recruitment
now under Himmler’s authority, had been exempt from the outset.

Such restrictions on his powers left Goebbels’s enthusiasm for his
new task undimmed. The belief that ‘will’ would overcome all
problems was immediately put into action as with his usual forceful
energy he unleashed a veritable frenzy of activity in his new role.
The staff of fifty that he rapidly assembled from a number of
ministries, most prominently from his own Propaganda Ministry,
prided themselves on their unbureaucratic methods, swift decision-
making, and improvisation. As his main agents in ensuring that
directives were implemented in the regions, leaving no stone
unturned in the quest to comb out all reserves of untapped labour,
Goebbels looked to the party’s Gauleiter, bolstering their already
extensive powers as Reich Defence Commissars. They could be
relied upon, in his view, to reinvoke the spirit of the ‘time of
struggle’, to ensure that bureaucracy did not get in the way of
action. (In practice, the cooperation of the Gauleiter was assured as
long as no inroads were made into the personnel of their own party
offices. Bormann ensured that they were well protected.)

Behind the actionism of the party, Goebbels also needed Hitler’s
backing. He ensured that this was forthcoming through a constant
stream of bulletins on progress (Fuhrer-Informationen), printed out
on a ‘Fuhrer-Machine’ — a typewriter with greatly enlarged
characters which Hitler’s failing eyesight could cope with —
recording successes and couching general recommendations (such as
simplifying unnecessary bureaucratic paperwork) in such a way
that, given Hitler’s frame of mind, approval would be as good as
automatic, thereby opening up yet further avenues for intervention.
Nevertheless, Hitler did not give blanket approval to all measures
suggested by Goebbels. He could rely upon Bormann to bring to his
attention any proposals which his own still sharp antennae would
tell him might have an unnecessarily harmful impact on morale,
both at home and quite especially among soldiers at the front.

Goebbels certainly produced a new, extreme austerity drive
within Germany in the first weeks in his new office as Total War
Plenipoteniary. But a large proportion of the 451,800 men sifted out
of the administration and economy were too old for military

service. Goebbels was forced, therefore, to turn to fit men in
reserved occupations — work thought essential for the war-effort,
including skilled employment in armaments factories or food
production. Their replacement, where possible, by older, less fit,
less experienced, less qualified workers was both administratively
complicated and inefficient. And the net addition of women workers
numbered only little over quarter of a million. Athough, partly
through Goebbels’s measures, it proved possible to send around a
million men to the front between August and December 1944,
German losses in the first three of those months numbered
1,189,000 dead and wounded. Whatever the trumpeting by
Goebbels of his achievements as Reich Plenipotentiary for the Total
War Effort, the reality was that he was scraping the bottom of the
barrel.

And among the most bizarre aspects of the ‘total war’ drive in the
second half of 1944 was the fact that at precisely the time he was
combing out the last reserves of manpower, Goebbels — according to
film director Veit Harlan — was allowing him, at Hitler’s express
command, to deploy 187,000 soldiers, withdrawn from active
service, as extras for the epic colour film of national heroism,
Kolberg, depicting the defence of the small Baltic town against
Napoleon as a model for the achievements of total war. According
to Harlan, Hitler as well as Goebbels was ‘convinced that such a
film was more useful than a military victory’. Even in the terminal
crisis of the regime, propaganda had to come first.

The evocation of heroic defence of the fatherland by the masses
against the invading Napoleonic army — the myth enunciated in
Kolberg — was put to direct use in the most vivid expression of the
last-ditch drive to ‘total war’: the launching by Heinrich Himmler of
the Volkssturm, or people’s militia, on 18 October 1944, the 131st
anniversary of the legendary defeat of Napoleon in the ‘Battle of the
Peoples’ near Leipzig, when a coalition of forces under Bliicher’s
leadership liberated German territory from the troops of the French
Emperor once and for all. The Volkssturm was the military
embodiment of the party’s belief in ‘triumph of the will’. It was the

party’s attempt to militarize the homeland, symbolizing unity
through the people’s participation in national defence, overcoming
the deficiencies in weapons and resources through sheer willpower.

Though Goebbels continued to harbour the belief that he would
incorporate in his ‘total war’ commission the organization of the
‘Volkswehr’ (People’s Defence), as it was initially to be called,
leaving the military aspects to the SA, Bormann and Himmler had
come to an agreement to divide responsibility between them. Drafts
for a decree by Hitler were put forward in early September. He
eventually signed the decree on 26 September, though it was dated
to the previous day. It spoke of the ‘final aim’ of the enemy alliance
as ‘the eradication of the German person’. This enemy must now be
repulsed until a peace securing Germany’s future could be
guaranteed. To attain this end, Hitler’s decree went on, in typical
parlance, ‘we set the total deployment of all Germans against the
known total annihilatory will of our Jewish-international enemies’.
In each party Gau, the ‘German Volkssturm’ was to be established,
comprising all men capable of bearing weapons between the ages of
sixteen and sixty. Training, military organization, and provision of
weaponry fell to Himmler as Commander of the Reserve Army.
Political and organizational matters were the province of Bormann,
acting on Hitler’s behalf. Party functionaries were given the task of
forming companies and battalions. A total number of 6 million
Volkssturm men was envisaged. Each Volkssturm man had to swear
an oath that he would be ‘unconditionally loyal and obedient to the
Fithrer of the Great German Reich Adolf Hitler’, and would ‘rather
die than abandon the freedom and thereby the social future of my
people’.

The men called up had to provide their own clothing, as well as
eating and drinking utensils, cooking equipment, a rucksack, and
blanket. And since munitions for the front were in short supply, the
weaponry for the men of the Volkssturm was predictably miserable.
It was little wonder that the Volkssturm was largely unpopular, and
widely seen as pointless on the grounds that the war was already
lost. Reluctance to serve in the Volkssturm, especially on the

eastern front, was well justified. Gauleiter Erich Koch reported
severe losses among Volkssturm units in East Prussia already in
October. The losses were militarily pointless. They did not hold up
the Red Army’s advance by a single day. In all, approaching
175,000 citizens who were mainly too old, too young, or too weak
to fight lost their lives in the Volkssturm. The futility of the losses
was a Clear sign that Germany was close to military bankruptcy.

As the autumn of 1944 headed towards what would prove the last
winter of the war, the fabric of the regime was still holding
together. But the threads were visibly starting to fray. The closing
of the ranks which had followed Stauffenberg’s assassination
attempt had temporarily seen a revitalization of the élan of the
party. Hitler had, almost as a reflex, turned inwards to those he
trusted. His distance, not just from the army leaders he detested,
but also from the organs of state administration, started to extend
immeasurably with his increased reliance on a diminishing number
of his long-standing paladins. Bormann’s position, dependent upon
the combination of his role as head of the party organization and,
especially, his proximity to Hitler as the Fuhrer’s secretary and
mouthpiece, guarding the portals and restricting access, was
particularly strengthened. He was one of the winners from the
changed circumstances after 20 July. Another was Goebbels who,
like Bormann, had seized the opportunity to enhance his own
position of power as the party increased its hold over practically all
walks of life within Germany. Mobilization and control had been
the essence of party activity since the beginning. Now, as the
regime tottered, it returned to its essence.

Another development, from a most unlikely source, provides in
retrospect — at the time it was still well concealed — the clearest
indication that the regime was starting to teeter. Among the biggest
beneficiaries of the failed coup of 20 July 1944 had been
Reichsfithrer-SS Heinrich Himmler. Hitler had given ‘loyal Heinrich’,
his trusted head of the labyrinthine security organization, overall
responsibility for uncovering the background to the conspiracy and
for rounding up the plotters. And beyond his other extensive

powers, Himmler had now also gained direct entrée into the
military sphere as Commander of the Reserve Army, with a remit to
undertake a full-scale reorganization. He was soon, as we have seen,
also to have control over the people’s militia, the Volkssturm. Yet at
this very time, Himmler, conceivably now the most powerful
individual in Germany after Hitler, was playing a double game,
combining every manifestation of utmost loyalty with secret
overtures to the West in the forlorn hope of saving not just his skin
but his position of power in the event of the British and Americans
eventually seeing sense and turning, with the help of his SS, to fend
off the threat of Communism. In October, Himmler used an SS
intermediary to put to an Italian industrialist with good connections
in England a proposal to make twenty-five German divisions in Italy
available to the Allies as a defence against Communism in return for
a guarantee of the preservation of the Reich’s territory and
population. Both the British and the Americans rejected the
overtures out of hand. In this scenario, Hitler would have been
dispensable. But it was pure self-delusion. Himmler was too
centrally implicated in the most appalling facets of the Nazi regime
to be taken seriously by the Allies as a prospective leader of a post-
Hitlerian Germany. For Himmler, too, there was no way out.
Without Hitler’s backing, his power would evaporate like a breath
in the chill morning air. This was as true in late 1944 as at any
other time during the Third Reich.

Hitler’s authority remained intact. But if they could have found
an escape route by removing him or discarding him, there were
now those among his closest paladins who would have followed it.

Ill

Meanwhile, the vice around Hitler’s Reich was tightening. Between
June and September the Wehrmacht lost on all fronts well over a
million men killed, captured, or missing. The losses of tanks, guns,
planes, and other armaments were incalculable. The war in the air
was by now almost wholly one-sided. Fuel shortages left many

German fighters unable to take to the air as the British and
American bomber armadas wreaked havoc on German towns and
cities with impunity by day as well as by night. The war at sea had
also by this time been definitively lost by Germany. The U-boat
fleet had never recovered from its losses in the second half of 1943,
while Allied convoys could now cross the Atlantic almost
unmolested. In the meantime, the territories of the Nazi empire
were shrinking markedly by the end of the summer following the
advances of the Allies on both western and eastern fronts since
June.

On the western front, Germany’s military commanders had by
then long viewed the continuation of the war as pointless. On
replacing Rundstedt in early June, the weak and impressionable
Kluge was easily persuaded by Hitler that the western commanders,
especially Rommel, had been far too pessimistic in their judgement
of the situation. After a two-day visit to the front, however, Kluge
had been forced to admit that Rommel was right. In his letter to
Hitler of 15 July, Rommel had explicitly stated that, heroically
though the troops were fighting, ‘the unequal struggle is heading
for its end’. He felt, therefore, compelled to ask Hitler, he wrote, ‘to
draw the consequences from this position without delay’. He let the
leaders of the conspiracy against Hitler know that he would be
prepared to join them if the demands for an end to the war were
dismissed. Germany’s most renowned field-marshal was never put
to the test. Three days before Stauffenberg’s bomb exploded,
Rommel was seriously injured when his car skidded from the road
after being strafed by an enemy aircraft.

Five days after the assassination attempt on Hitler, ‘Operation
Cobra’, the Allied attack southwards towards Avranches, began with
a ferocious ‘carpet-bombing’ assault by over 2,000 aircraft,
dropping 47,000 tons of bombs on an already weakened German
panzer division in an area of only six or so square miles. It ended on
30 July with the taking of Avranches and the opening not only of
the route to the Brittany coastal ports, but also to the exposed
German flank towards the east, and to the heart of France.

The significance of the loss of Avranches was still not fully
appreciated when Hitler provided Jodl with his overview of the
entire military situation on the evening of 31 July. Hitler was far
from unrealistic in his assessment. He was well aware of how
threatening the position was on all fronts, and how impossible it
was in the current circumstances to combat the overwhelming
Allied superiority in men and materials, above all in air-power. His
main hope was to buy time. Weapon technology, more planes, and
an eventual split in the alliance would open up new opportunities.
He had to get some breathing-space in the west, he told his
Luftwaffe adjutant, Nicolaus von Below, shortly after his briefing
with Jodl. Then, with new panzer divisions and fighter formations,
he could launch a major offensive on the western front. In common
with many observers, Below had thought it more important to
concentrate all forces against the Red Army in the east. Hitler
replied that he could attack the Russians at a later point. But this
could not be done with the Americans already in the Reich. (He led
Below to believe at the same time that he feared the power of the
Jews in the USA more than the power of the Bolsheviks.) His
strategy was, therefore, to gain time, inflict a major blow on the
western Allies, hope for a split in the alliance, and turn on the
Russians from a new position of strength.

Hitler thought, so he told Jodl, that the eastern front could be
stabilized, as long as additional forces could be mobilized. But a
breakthrough by the enemy in the east, whether in East Prussia or
Silesia, imperilling the homeland itself and bearing serious
psychological consequences, would pose a critical danger. Any
destabilization on the eastern front would, he went on, affect the
stance of Turkey, Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary. Preventive
measures had to be taken. It was vital to secure Hungary, both for
vital raw materials such as bauxite and manganese and for
communications lines with south-eastern Europe. Bulgaria was
essential to securing a hold on the Balkans and obtaining ore from
Greece. He also feared a British landing in the Balkans or on the
Dalmatian islands, which Germany was scarcely in a position to

ward off and which ‘could naturally lead to catastrophic
consequences’.

On the Italian front, Hitler saw the greatest advantage in the
tying down of significant Allied forces which could otherwise be
deployed elsewhere. The withdrawal of German forces into the
Apennines would remove tactical mobility, would still not prevent
an Allied advance, and would leave only retreat to alpine defence
positions as a possibility — thereby freeing up Allied troops for the
western front. But as a last resort, he was prepared to give up Italy
(and the entire Balkans), pull back German troops to the Alps, and
withdraw his main forces for the vital struggle on the western front.

This was for him the decisive theatre of war. The troops would
not understand him remaining in East Prussia when valuable
western parts of the Reich were threatened, and behind them the
Ruhr — Germany’s industrial heartland. Preparations would have to
be made to move Fuhrer Headquarters to the west. Command
would have to be centralized. Kluge, supreme commander in the
west, could not be left with the responsibility. So paranoid was
Hitler by now about treachery within the army, that he told Jodl it
would be necessary in such an event to avoid communicating such a
plan to army command in the west — pointing to Sttilpnagel’s
involvement in the plot against him —- since it would probably be
immediately betrayed to the enemy.

Hitler pointed to what he saw as a decisive issue in the west. ‘If
we lose France as a war area, we lose the basis of the U-boat war.’
(Though the U-boats were ineffective in the second half of 1944,
Hitler was persuaded by Donitz that new, improved submarines
would soon be ready, and would be a vital weapon in the war
against the western powers.) In addition, essential raw materials —
he singled out wolfram (important for steel production) and electro-
technical products — would be lost. If it were not so important to the
war effort to hold on to France, he said, he would vacate the coastal
areas — still vital for U-boat bases at Brest and St Nazaire — and pull
back mobile forces to a more defensible line. But he saw no
prospect at present of holding such a line with the forces available,

wherever the line might be drawn. ‘We’ve got to be clear,’ he
stated, ‘that a change could come about in France only if we succeed
— even for a certain time - in gaining air-supremacy.’ But he drew
the conclusion that, ‘however bitter it might be at the moment’,
everything had to be done to hold back ‘for the most extreme case’
as a ‘last reserve’ whatever Luftwaffe divisions could be assembled
in the Reich — though that could take weeks — to be deployed
wherever it might be possible ‘at the last throw of the dice’ to bring
about a decisive shift in fortunes.

Hitler was desperate to buy time. ‘I can’t operate myself,’ he said,
‘but I can make it colossally difficult for the enemy to operate in the
depths of the area.’ For this, it was essential to deprive the enemy
of access to ports on the French coast, preventing the landing of
troops, armaments, and provisions. (At this point only Cherbourg,
with a much-damaged harbour, was in Allied hands.) Hitler was
prepared, as he bluntly stated, ‘simply to sacrifice certain troops’ to
this end. The ports were to be held, he emphasized, ‘under all
circumstances, with complete disregard for the people there, to
make it impossible for the enemy to supply unlimited numbers of
men’. Should this not happen, a breakthrough could come quickly.
Along with this, in an early glimpse of what would become a
‘scorched-earth’ policy targeted finally at the Reich itself, all
railway installations, including track and locomotives, were to be
destroyed, as were bridges. The ports, too, were in the last resort to
be destroyed if they could not be held. If the ports could be held for
between six and ten weeks in the autumn, precious time would have
been gained.

Time was, however, not on Hitler’s side. Learning of the gravity
of the Allied capture of Avranches, he ordered — picking up on an
operational plan that had been put forward by Kluge - an
immediate counterstrike westwards from Mortain, initially intended
to take place on 2 August, aimed at retaking Avranches and splitting
the advancing American forces under General George S. Patton. The
counter-offensive, eventually launched on 7 August, proved
disastrous. It lasted only a day, could not prevent some of Patton’s

troops from sweeping down into Brittany (where stiff defence,
however, saw the garrison at Brest hold out until 19 September),
and ended with the German forces in disarray but narrowly
avoiding even worse calamity.

On 15 August Hitler refused Kluge’s request to pull back around
100,000 troops threatened with imminent disaster through
encirclement near Falaise. When he was unable to reach Kluge that
day — the field-marshal had entered the battle-zone itself in the
heart of the ‘Falaise pocket’ and his radio had been put out of action
by enemy fire — Hitler, well aware of Kluge’s flirtation with the
conspiracy against him and of his pessimism about the western
front, jumped to the conclusion that he was negotiating a surrender
with the western Allies. It was, said Hitler, ‘the worst day of his
life’. He promptly recalled Field-Marshal Model, one of his most
trusted generals, from the eastern front, appointed him to take over
from Kluge and dispatched him to western front headquarters. Until
Model arrived, Kluge had not even been informed by Hitler that he
was about to be dismissed. Hitler’s peremptory handwritten note,
handed over by Model and ordering Kluge back to Germany, ended
with the threateningly ambiguous comment that the field-marshal
should contemplate in which direction he wished to go. Model’s
arrival was unable to alter the plight of the German troops, but
under his command - assisted by tactical errors of the Allied
ground-forces commander, General Montgomery — it proved
possible to squeeze out at the last minute some 50,000 men from
the ever-closing ‘Falaise pocket’ to fight again another day, closer to
home. As many again, however, were taken prisoner and a further
10,000 killed.

Kluge must have reckoned with the near certainty that he would
be promptly arrested, expelled from the Wehrmacht, and put before
the People’s Court for his connections with the plotters against
Hitler. On the way back to Germany on 19 August, in the vicinity of
Metz, he asked his chauffeur to stop the car for a rest. Depressed,
worn out, and in despair, he swallowed a cyanide pill.

The day before, he had written a letter to Hitler. The field-
marshal, who (as Hitler knew) had had prior knowledge of the
bomb-plot, and who had even the year before Stauffenberg’s
attempt shown sympathy for Tresckow and the oppositional group
in Army Group Centre, used his dying words to praise Hitler’s
leadership. ‘My Fuhrer, I have always admired your greatness,’ he
wrote. ‘You have led an honest, an entirely great struggle,’ he
continued, with reference to the war in the east. ‘History will testify
to that.” He then appealed to Hitler now to show the necessary
greatness to bring to an end a struggle with no prospect of success
in order to release the suffering of his people. This dying plea was
as far as he would go to distance himself from the Dictator’s war
leadership. He ended with a final vow of loyalty: ‘I depart from
you, my Ftthrer, to whom I was inwardly closer than you perhaps
imagined, in the consciousness of having carried out my duty to the
very limits.’

Hitler’s direct reaction to the letter is not known. But Kluge’s
suicide merely convinced him not only of the field-marshal’s
implication in the bomb-plot, but also that he had been trying to
surrender his forces in the west to the enemy. Hitler found it
difficult to comprehend, as he bitterly reflected. He had promoted
Kluge twice, given him the highest honours, made him sizeable
donations (including a cheque for RM 250,000 tax-free on his
sixtieth birthday, and a big supplement to his field-marshal’s
salary). He was anxious to prevent any news seeping out about
Kluge’s alleged attempt to capitulate. It could seriously affect
morale; it would certainly bring further contempt on the army. He
let the generals know about Kluge’s suicide. But for public
consumption the field-marshal’s death — from a heart-attack, it was
said — was announced only after his body had lain in the church on
his Brandenburg estate for a fortnight. Kluge’s funeral was a quiet
affair. Hitler had banned all ceremonials.

On the day that Kluge had temporarily been out of contact, 15
August, the Allies undertook ‘Operation Dragoon’, the landing of
troops on the French Mediterranean coast. Quickly capturing

Marseilles and Toulon, they pushed northwards, forcing Hitler
reluctantly to agree to the withdrawal to the north of almost all his
forces in southern France in the attempt to build a cohesive front
along the upper Marne and Sa6ne stretching to the Swiss border.
The end of the German occupation of France was now in sight.
Though it would take several more weeks to complete, the symbolic
moment arrived when, prompted by strikes, a popular uprising, and
attacks by the French Resistance against the German occupiers, and
by the eventual readiness of the German Commander, General
Dietrich von Choltitz, to surrender (despite orders from Hitler to
reduce Paris to rubble if it could not be held), the Allied Supreme
Commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, gave a French division
the honour of liberating the French capital on 24 August.

By now, the western Allies had over 2 million men on the
Continent. Advancing into Belgium, they liberated Brussels on 3
September and next day captured the important port of Antwerp
before the harbour installations could be destroyed. Only
Cherbourg, of the major Channel ports, had up to this point been in
Allied hands, and supplies through that route were seriously
hampered by the level of destruction. Antwerp was vital to the
assault on Germany. But it was as late as 27 November before the
Scheldt estuary was secured and before the approaches to the
harbour were fully cleared of mines. In the interim, the Allied drive
towards the German borders suffered a major setback with the
serious losses suffered, especially by British troops, in ten days of
bitter fighting in the combined airborne and land operation —
‘Market Garden’ — launched on 17 September, to seize the river-
crossings at Grave, Nijmegen, and Arnhem. Beyond supply
problems, battle fatigue, and replacing the men lost, the Allied
advance was stalling because of the stiff German defence, aided by
shortened supply-lines, redeployment of the men extricated from
the Falaise Pocket, and reinforcements drawn from the east. In the
west, it was plain, despite the dramatic Allied successes since D-
Day, the war was far from over.

In the east, following the Red Army’s big summer offensive, the
German network of alliances with Balkan countries started to
unravel in August much as Hitler had feared. On 2 August, Turkey
announced that it was breaking off relations with Germany.
Economically, it meant the loss of chrome supplies. Militarily, it
was Clear that Turkey would at some point join the Allies. On 20
August, when the Soviets attacked Army Group South Ukraine,
Romanian units deserted en masse, many of them joining the enemy
and turning on their former allies. Reaching the Danube before the
retreating Germans, Romanian troops closed the river-crossing.
Sixteen German divisions, exposed to the onslaught of the Red
Army, were totally destroyed. It was a military calamity of the first
order. Three days later, Antonescu was deposed following a coup in
Bucharest. His successor, King Michael, sued for peace. Romania
swapped sides, declaring war on Germany — and on Hungary (from
which it now intended to regain the territory in Transylvania that it
had been compelled to give up in 1940). The Red Army, joined by
Romanian units, was now free to sweep across the Danube. The
Wehrmacht, meanwhile, had lost 3 80,000 indispensable troops
within a fortnight.

Bulgaria, a country which since 1941 had played a careful
diplomatic hand, was by this time hopelessly exposed. Soviet troops
crossed its borders on 8 September (the USSR having declared war
three days earlier), and on the same day Bulgaria rapidly switched
sides and declared war on Germany. The German control over the
entire Balkan region now held by the most slender of threads. The
collapse of Romania and Bulgaria, followed by rapid Soviet
occupation, meant the urgent withdrawal of German troops from
Greece was imperative. This began in September. In mid-October
British airborne troops were able to occupy Athens. By then, Tito’s
partisan army was on the verge of entry into Belgrade. German
troops were meanwhile engaged in the brutal suppression, finally
accomplished by the end of October, of a rising, undertaken in the
main by Soviet-inspired indigenous partisans alongside a sizeable
minority of the 60,000-strong army, in the puppet state of Slovakia.

Most important of all, from Hitler’s point of view, in the gathering
mayhem in south-eastern Europe, Hungary, his chief ally but long
wavering, had immediately following the volte-face in Romania
begun urgent soundings for peace with the Soviet Union.

In these same critical weeks, Hitler was also losing a vital ally in
northern Europe. The danger signals about Finland’s position had
been flashing brightly for months. On 2 September, State President
Mannerheim informed Hitler that Finland was unable to continue
the struggle. Relations were to be broken off immediately. German
troops were to leave the country by 15 September. On 19
September, Finland signed an armistice with the Soviet Union.

In these same momentous months, throughout the whole of
August and September, the German leadership was also faced with
suppressing the dangerous rising in Warsaw, which had begun on 1
August, two days after tanks of the Red Army had pushed into the
suburbs of Warsaw on the east of the Vistula and Soviet radio had
encouraged the city’s inhabitants to rise against their occupiers. The
Poles were aware that they could reckon with little help from the
western powers. But they were unprepared to be left in the lurch by
the Soviet Union. However, the Red Army halted at the Vistula and
did not enter the city while Stalin — cynically conscious of
containing hopes of Polish independence in a post-war order —
neither aided the Poles nor, until it was too late, facilitated attempts
by the British and Americans to supply the insurgents with weapons
and munitions.

Unaware of Stalin’s ploy, the German Chief of Staff Guderian,
fearing cooperation between the insurgents and the Red Army,
asked Hitler to include Warsaw - still under the aegis of Hans Frank
as Governor General — in the military zone of operations and place
it thereby under Wehrmacht control. Hitler refused. Instead, he
handed over full responsibility for the crushing of the rising to SS
chief Himmler, who ordered the total destruction of Warsaw. Men,
women, and children were slaughtered in their thousands while
Warsaw burned. By the time General Bor-Komorowski, head of the
Polish underground army, surrendered on 2 October, the savage

repression had left Polish civilian victims numbering around
200,000. German losses amounted to some 26,000 men killed,
wounded, or missing. On 11 October, Hans Frank received
notification that all raw materials, textiles, and furniture left in
Warsaw were to be removed before the smouldering remains of the
city were razed to the ground.

As the news from all parts of his empire turned from appalling to
disastrous, Hitler fell ill. On 8 September, he complained to Morell,
his doctor, of pressure around his right eye. In his notes, Morell
indicated blood-pressure. Six days later, he recorded fluctuating
blood-pressure ‘following great agitation’. Next day, 15 September,
Morell noted: ‘Complains of dizziness, throbbing head, and return of
the tremor to his legs, particularly the left, and hands.’ His left
ankle was swollen. Again, ‘much agitation’ was registered by
Morell. Hitler’s blood-pressure was regularly too high, sometimes
worryingly so. It was an indication that he had a cardiac problem,
and an electrocardiogram on 24 September did indicate progressive
arteriosclerosis (though no acute anginal danger).

During the night before his cardiogram, Hitler’s acute stomach
spasms returned. They were so bad the following night that he was
unable to get up in the morning — an extremely rare occurrence —
and seemed unusually apathetic. By 27 September, his skin had a
yellowish appearance. By now he was quite ill. The jaundice,
accompanied by high temperature and severe stomach cramps, kept
him in bed during the following days. It was 2 October before the
yellow skin-colouring finally disappeared and Hitler felt well
enough to get out of bed, dress himself, and make his way to the
first situation briefing since he had fallen ill. He still seemed
lifeless, however, to those in his company. By the middle of the
month, when he felt himself again, he had lost sixteen pounds in
weight.

While Hitler was suffering from jaundice, Dr Giesing, the ear,
nose, and throat specialist who had been brought in to treat him
after Stauffenberg’s bomb had exploded, began to be suspicious
about Morell’s treatment. He started to wonder whether the little
black tablets that Hitler took each day on Morell’s prescription, ‘Dr
Koester’s Anti-Gas Pills’, were in fact a contributory cause of the
Dictator’s chronic stomach complaint rather than a satisfactory
medicine for it. Whatever his concern for Hitler, Giesing’s own
ambitions to oust and displace Morell probably played a part in
what he did next. He managed to lay hands on a number of the
pills, had them analysed, and discovered that they contained
strychnine. Giesing dosed himself with the pills and found they had
mildly harmful effects — effects he associated with those on Hitler.
Giesing made mention of his findings, and his suspicions, to Hitler’s
other attendant doctors, Dr Karl Brandt and Dr Hans-Karl von
Hasselbach, who passed on the sentiments to others in Hitler’s
entourage. When Hitler found out, he was furious. He announced
his complete faith in Morell, and dismissed Brandt and Hasselbach,
who had both been with him since the early years of his rule.
Giesing, too, was requested to leave Hitler’s service. Their
replacement was one of Himmler’s former staff doctors, SS-
Obersturmbannftihrer Ludwig Stumpfegger.

Morell’s diagnoses and methods of treatment were indeed often
questionable. Many of the innumerable tablets, medicines, and
injections he prescribed for Hitler were of dubious value, often
useless, and in some instances even exacerbated the problem
(particularly relating to the chronic intestinal disorder). But
allegations that Morell was intentionally harming Hitler were
misplaced. The fat, unctuous, heavily perspiring Morell was both
physically unattractive and, through his privileged access to Hitler,
provoked much resentment in the ‘court circle’. That he visibly
exploited the relationship to his patient to further his own power,
influence, and material advantage simply magnified the ill-feeling
towards Morell. But, whatever his considerable limitations as a

medical practitioner, Morell was certainly doing his best for the
Leader he so much admired and to whom he was devoted.

The hypochondriac Hitler was, in turn, dependent upon Morell.
He needed to believe, and apparently did believe, that Morell’s
treatment was the best he could get, and was beneficial. In that
way, Morell might indeed have been good for Hitler. At any rate,
Morell and his medicines, were neither a major nor even minor part
of the explanation of Germany’s plight in the autumn of 1944. That
Hitler was poisoned by the strychnine and belladonna in the anti-gas
pills or other medicaments, drugged on the opiates given him to
relieve his intestinal spasms, or dependent upon the cocaine which
formed 1 per cent of the ophthalmic drops prescribed by Dr Giesing
for conjunctivitis, can be discounted. Probably by now he was
indeed dependent upon the noxious cocktail of drugs dispensed by
Morell. These included regular stimulants to combat his tiredness
and sustain his energy and may well have intensified his violent
mood-swings and physical decline. However, his physical problems
in autumn 1944, chronic though they were, had largely arisen from
lifestyle, diet, lack of exercise, and excessive stress, on top of likely
congenital weaknesses (which probably accounted for the cardiac
problem as well as Parkinson’s Syndrome). Mentally, he was under
enormous strain, which magnified his deeply embedded extreme
personality traits. His phobias, hypochondria, and hysterical
reactions were probable indicators of some form of personality
disorder or psychiatric abnormality. An element of paranoia
underwrote his entire political ‘career’, and became even more
evident towards the end. But Hitler did not suffer from any of the
major psychotic disorders. He was certainly not clinically insane. If
there was lunacy in the position Germany found itself in by the
autumn of 1944, it was not the purported insanity of one man but
that of the high-stakes ‘winner-takes-all’ gamble for continental
dominance and world power which the country’s leaders — not just
Hitler — backed by much of a gullible population had earlier been
prepared to take, and which was now costing the country dearly
and revealed as a high-risk policy without an exit-clause.

That all ways out were closed off was made plain once again during
these weeks. Hints had come from Japan in late August that Stalin
might entertain ideas of a peace settlement with Hitler’s Germany.
Japan was interested in brokering such a peace, since it would leave
Germany able to devote its entire war effort to the western Allies,
thereby, it was hoped, draining the energies of the USA away from
the Pacific. With massive casualties on the Soviet side, the
territories lost since 1941 regained, and a presumed interest in
Stalin wishing to harness what was left of German industrial
potential for a later fight with the West, Tokyo thought prospects
for a negotiated peace were not altogether negligible. On 4
September, Oshima, the Japanese Ambassador in Berlin, travelled to
East Prussia to put the suggestion to take up feelers with Stalin
directly to Hitler. The response was predictable. Germany would
soon launch a fresh counter-offensive with new weapons at its
disposal. And there were, in any case, no signs that Stalin was
entertaining thoughts of peace. Only a block on his advance might
make him change his mind, Hitler realistically concluded. He
wanted no overtures to be made by the Japanese for the present.

Oshima evidently did not give up. Later in the month, he used the
pretext of a discussion with Werner Naumann, State Secretary in the
Propaganda Ministry, about the ‘total war’ effort to bring the
suggestion of a separate peace with the Soviet Union to Goebbels’s
ears. He could be certain that by this route the proposal would
again reach Hitler, perhaps with the backing of one who was known
to carry influence at Fuhrer Headquarters.

Naumann’s report was plainly the first Goebbels had heard of the
Japanese suggestion. The Propaganda Minister called the discussion
between his State Secretary and the Japanese Ambassador ‘quite
sensational’. Oshima told Naumann, according to Goebbels’s
summary, that Germany should make every attempt to reach a
‘special peace’. Such an arrangement would be possible, he led
Naumann to believe. He was frank about the Japanese interest,
forced by its own problems in the war, in giving Germany a free

hand in the west. He thought Stalin, a realist, would be open to
suggestions if Germany were prepared to accept ‘sacrifices’, and
criticized the inflexibility of German foreign policy. Goebbels noted
that Oshima’s proposal amounted to a reversal of German war
policy, and was aware that the position of the pro-German Japanese
Ambassador at home had been seriously weakened as the fortunes
of war had turned. But, as Oshima had presumed, Goebbels
immediately passed on the information to Bormann and Himmler,
for further transmission to Hitler himself.

Goebbels decided that more must be done. But rather than try to
put the case verbally to Hitler, he decided to prepare a lengthy
memorandum. By midnight on 20 September, after he had worked
all afternoon and evening on it, the memorandum was ready.
Rehearsing what he had heard from Oshima, he suggested that
Stalin’s cold realism, knowing that he would sooner or later find
himself in conflict with the west, offered an opening, since the
Soviet leader would not want either to exhaust his own military
strength or allow the German armaments potential to fall into the
hands of the western powers. He pointed to Japan’s self-interest in
brokering a deal. An arrangement with Stalin would provide new
prospects in the west, and place the Anglo-Americans in a position
where they could not indefinitely continue the war. ‘What we would
attain,’ he stated, ‘would not be the victory that we dreamed of in
1941, but it would still be the greatest victory in German history.
The sacrifices that the German people had made in this war would
thereby be fully justified.’

Goebbels waited impatiently for Hitler’s reactions to his
memorandum. Eventually, he learnt that Hitler had read it, but then
put it away without comment. A promised audience to discuss it
with him never materialized. Hitler’s illness intervened. But in any
case, there is no indication that Hitler took the slightest notice of
his Propaganda Minister’s suggestion. His own plans ran along quite
different lines. The idea of a western offensive, which he had
hatched in mid-August, was taking concrete shape. He was
contemplating a final attempt to turn the tide: using the last

reserves of troops and weapons for an offensive through the
Ardennes in late autumn or winter aimed at inflicting a significant
blow on the western Allies by retaking Antwerp (depriving them of
their major continental port) and even forcing them ‘back into the
Atlantic’. ‘A single breakthrough on the western front! You will see!’
he told Speer. ‘That will lead to a collapse and panic among the
Americans. We'll drive through in the middle and take Antwerp.
With that, they’ll have lost their supply harbour. And there’ll be a
huge encirclement of the entire English army with hundreds of
thousands of prisoners. Like it was in Russia!’

The objective was to gain time to develop new weapons. From a
new position of strength, he could then turn against the Russians.
He was well aware that the ‘wonder weapons’ were, in their current
state of deployment, incapable of bringing any decisive change in
war fortunes, or of satisfying the exaggerated hopes that incessant
propaganda had raised in them among the German public. When he
had first seen the prototypes of the V2, Hitler had envisaged 5,000
of the rockets being directed against Britain in a massive initial
onslaught. But when the eventual launch took place on 8
September, it proved possible only to dispatch twenty-five rockets
in a period of ten days. They were little more than a pin-prick in the
Allied thrust against Nazi Germany. Even so, Hitler expected a great
deal from the further deployment of the weapon. By the end of the
war, through the brutal exploitation of foreign workers, it had
proved possible to aim over 3,000 V2s mainly at London, Antwerp,
and Brussels. There was no defence against the missiles. Their
terroristic effect was considerable, causing the deaths of 2,724
persons in England and many more in Belgium. Their military effect
was, however, negligible.

Meanwhile, the development of the one secret weapon certainly
capable of affecting Germany’s war fortunes, the atomic bomb, had
been worked on since the start of the war (though with only slow
progress). The research was given special support by Speer in 1942
but, despite his offer of increased funding, was still nowhere near
completion and — though the German nuclear scientists were

unaware of it — lagged far behind advances made in the USA. There
had seemed no need to force research on such a weapon during the
early, triumphant phase of the war. By the time of Speer’s meeting
with leading atomic scientists, including Otto Hahn and Werner
Heisenberg, in mid-1942, a nuclear weapon was — as the Armaments
Minister was told — theoretically possible but in practice several
years off. Hitler, already aware in a general sense of the feasibility
of an atomic bomb in the more distant future, took Speer’s report as
confirmation that he would never live to see its deployment, that it
could play no part in the present war. Consequently, he took no
great interest in it. By this time, in any case, the resources needed
to deploy it were not simply not available — and were diminishing
fast. It is as well that the bomb was not on offer: Hitler would not
have hesitated for an instant to drop it on London and Moscow.

A key part of Hitler’s strategy was the deployment of large
numbers of fighters on the western front to regain the initiative in
the air. He had emphasized this in his briefing with Jodl at the end
of July. In August, when Speer and Adolf Galland, the flying ace
who headed the Luftwaffe’s fighter arm, tried to persuade him to
use the fighters in the Reich rather than at the western front, he had
exploded in such a frenzy of rage that he had ordered a stop to all
aircraft production in favour of total concentration on flak. Speer
had ignored the outburst of frustration. In September, fighter
production reached a record 2,878 aircraft — a two-and-a-half-fold
increase over production in January. Hitler had his fighters.

Whether they would have any fuel was another question. Hitler
knew that raw materials and fuel had sunk to perilous levels. Speer
sent him a memorandum on 5 September pointing out that the loss
of chrome from Turkey meant that the entire armaments production
would grind to a halt within sixteen or so months, by 1 January
1946. Hitler took the news calmly. It can only have encouraged him
in the thought that there was nothing to lose, and that everything
had to be staked on the new western offensive. He was also
informed by Speer that the fuel situation was so critical that fighter
squadrons were being grounded and army movements restricted. To

make 17,500 tons of fuel - what had formerly been two-and-a-half
days’ production — available for the Ardennes Offensive, delivery to
other parts of the front had to be seriously curtailed.

Together with Jodl, Hitler pored over maps of the Ardennes
while lying on his sick-bed at the end of September. He later told
Goebbels that he had spent the weeks of his illness almost
exclusively brooding over his revenge. Now he was well again, he
could begin to put his intentions into effect. It would be his final
gamble. As he knew, it was a long shot. ‘If it doesn’t succeed,’ he
told Speer, ‘I see no other possibility of bringing the war to a
favourable conclusion.’ ‘But,’ he added, ‘we’ll pull through.’

Before he could fully focus his attention on operational
preparations for the coming offensive, a lingering remnant of the
July bomb-plot momentarily detained him. Hitler had suspected
since early August that Rommel had known about the plot against
him. This had been confirmed by the testimony of Lieutenant-
Colonel Casar von Hofacker, a member of Sttilpnagel’s staff in Paris
implicated in the plot, who had provided a written statement of
Rommel’s support for the conspiracy. Hitler showed the statement
to Keitel and had Rommel summoned to see him. The field-marshal,
recuperating from his injuries at home near Ulm, claimed he was
not fit to travel. At this, Keitel wrote Rommel a letter, drafted by
Hitler, suggesting he report to the Fuhrer if innocent. Otherwise, he
would face trial. He should weigh up the consequences and if
necessary act on them. Hitler ordered the letter and Hofacker’s
incriminating statement to be taken to Rommel by General Wilhelm
Burgdorf (the replacement for Schmundt, who had died of the
injuries he received in the bomb-blast on 20 July, as his chief
Wehrmacht adjutant).

Burgdorf, accompanied by his deputy, General Ernst Maisel,
drove to Rommel’s home at Herrlingen on Saturday, 14 October,
and handed over the letter together with Hofacker’s statement.
Rommel inquired whether Hitler was aware of the statement. He
then requested a little time to think matters over. He did not take
long. Hitler had given orders to Burgdorf that Rommel should be

prevented from shooting himself — the traditional mode of suicide
among officers — and should be offered poison so that the death
could be attributed to brain damage following the car accident.
Mindful of Rommel’s popularity among the German public, Hitler
offered him a state funeral with all honours. Faced with expulsion
from the army, trial before the People’s Court, certain execution,
and inevitable recriminations for his family, Rommel took the
poison.

Hitler was represented by Rundstedt at the state funeral in the
town hall at Ulm on 18 October. Rundstedt declared in his eulogy
that Rommel’s ‘heart belonged to the Fiihrer’. Addressing the dead
field-marshal, he intoned: ‘Our Fuhrer and Supreme Commander
sends you through me his thanks and his greetings.’ For public
consumption, Hitler announced the same day that Rommel had
succumbed to his severe wounds following his car-accident. ‘With
him, one of our best army leaders has passed away ... His name has
entered the history of the German people.’

Another, more far-reaching, problem preoccupied Hitler in the
middle of October: Hungary’s attempt to defect from its alliance
with Germany. Hitler had feared (and expected) this eventuality for
weeks. The feelers, known to German intelligence, put out both to
the western Allies and to the Soviet Union after Romania’s defection
gave a clear sign of the way things were moving. At the beginning
of October, Horthy had sent a delegation to Moscow to begin
negotiations to take Hungary out of the war. Tough conditions laid
down by Molotov, on behalf of the Allies, for Hungary to change
sides, including an immediate declaration of war on Germany, were
accepted by Horthy and signed by the Hungarian delegation in
Moscow on 11 October. Their implementation had to await the coup
being prepared in Budapest against the German forces in Hungary.
Pressed by the Soviet Union to act, Horthy informed the German
envoy Edmund Veesenmayer on 15 October that Hungary was
leaving the German alliance and announced the armistice in a radio
broadcast in the early afternoon.

Hitler had not stood idly by while these developments were
taking place. Both strategically, and also on account of its economic
importance for foodstuffs and fuel supplies, everything had to be
done to prevent Hungary going the way of Romania and Bulgaria.
For weeks, Hitler had been preparing his own counter-coup in
Budapest, aimed at ousting Horthy, replacing him with a puppet
government under Ferencz Szalasi — fanatical leader of the radical
Hungarian fascist party, the Arrow Cross — and thus ensuring that
Hungary did not defect. Already in mid-September Otto Skorzeny,
Hitler’s leading trouble-shooter (since his daring rescue of Mussolini
a year earlier), had been called to the Wolf ’s Lair and ordered to
prepare an operational plan to seize by force the Citadel in Budapest
— the fortress which was the residence of Horthy and his entourage
— should Hungary betray its alliance with Germany.

Skorzeny immediately began detailed planning of the complex
operation. It involved the kidnapping of Horthy’s son, Miklés (who,
as German intelligence knew, had been working through Yugoslav
contacts to promote a separate peace with the Soviet Union) in
order to blackmail his father into abandoning intentions to defect.
In a daring ambush on the morning of Sunday, 15 October,
Skorzeny’s men, following a five-minute flurry of shooting with
Hungarian bodyguards, carried off the younger Horthy, rolled up in
a carpet, bundled him into a waiting lorry, whisked him to an
airfield, and put him in a plane bound for Vienna and his eventual
destination, Mauthausen concentration camp.

Admiral Horthy was faced with the fact of his son’s kidnap when
Veesenmayer arrived for their prearranged meeting at noon.
Veesenmayer told Horthy that at the first sign of ‘treason’, his son
would be shot. The Regent’s response was a combination of furious
protestation and near nervous collapse. Neither was, of course, to
any avail. But nor could German threats deter him from making his
radio announcement two hours later of the separate peace with the
Soviet Union. No sooner had he finished speaking than the radio
building was seized by Arrow Cross men, who put out a counter-
declaration avowing Hungary’s continuation of the fight against the

Soviet Union on Germany’s side. A little later Szalasi announced his
takeover of power. That evening, the blackmail on Horthy came
into full effect. He was told that if he resigned and formally handed
over power to Szalasi, he would be given asylum in Germany, and
his son would be freed; if not, the Citadel would be taken by force.
Horthy buckled under the extreme pressure. He agreed to step
down from office and make way for Szalasi. Skorzeny met little
resistance when, accompanied by units of ‘Panther’ and ‘Goliath’
tanks, he entered the Citadel early next morning. Two days later, on
18 October, Horthy was on his way to Germany in a special train,
accompanied by Skorzeny and a German army escort. He would
spend the remainder of the war ‘as the Fuhrer’s guest’, in Schlofs
Hirschberg, near Weilheim, in Upper Bavaria. Under its new,
fanatical fascist leadership, Hungary’s fate remained tied to
Germany’s until the encircled defendants of Budapest gave up the
struggle on 11 February 1945. Only a few hundred succeeded in
breaking through to German lines. It was the end of Hitler’s last
remaining ally in south-eastern Europe.

With the failure of Horthy’s attempt to take Hungary out of the
war, the final torment of the largest Jewish community still under
German control began. As we noted earlier, Horthy had halted
deportations — mainly to Auschwitz — in July. By that date, 437,402
Jews — more than half of the entire community — had been sent to
their deaths. By the time of the deposition of Horthy and takeover
of power by Szalasi in mid-October, Himmler was halting the ‘Final
Solution’ and terminating the killings at Auschwitz. But the
desperate labour shortage in Germany now led to plans to deploy
Hungarian Jews as slave labourers in the underground assembly
sites of V2 missiles. Without trains to transport them, they would
have to walk. Within days of Szalasi taking over, tens of thousands
of Jews — women as well as men — were being rounded up and, by
the end of the month, beginning what for so many would turn into
death marches as they succumbed to exhaustion, cold, and the
torture of both Hungarian and SS guards. So high was the death rate
among Jewish women, in fact, that Szalasi, probably concerned for

his own skin as the war fortunes continued to worsen for Germany,
stopped the treks in mid-November. Subsequent attempts of the SS
to remove more Jews by rail were vitiated by lack of transport.
Meanwhile, for the 70,000 remaining Budapest Jews, crammed into
a ghetto within range of Soviet guns, deprived of all property,
terrorized and killed at will by Arrow Cross men, the daily
nightmare continued until the surrender of the city in February. It is
estimated that the bodies of up to 10,000 Jews were lying unburied
in the streets and houses of Budapest by that time.

Meanwhile, on 21 October a delighted Hitler, recovered from his
recent illness, was welcoming Skorzeny with outstretched arms as
he led him into his dimly-lit bunker at the Wolf’s Lair to hear the
story of his triumph in Budapest and reward him with promotion to
Obersturmbannftihrer. When Skorzeny stood up to leave, Hitler
detained him: ‘Don’t go, Skorzeny,’ he remarked. ‘I have perhaps
the most important job in your life for you. So far very few people
know of the preparations for a secret plan in which you have a
great part to play. In December, Germany will start a great
offensive, which may well decide her fate.’ He proceeded to give
Skorzeny a detailed outline of the military operation which would
from now on occupy so much of his time: the Ardennes Offensive.

Hitler had laid out his demands for an Ardennes offensive on 16
September. Guderian voiced grave misgivings because of the
situation on the eastern front, the theatre for which he was directly
responsible. Jodl warned of air supremacy and the likelihood of
parachute landings. Hitler ignored them. He wanted, he said, 1,500
fighters by 1 November, when preparations for the offensive must
be complete. The launch of the offensive would take place in bad
weather, when enemy aircraft were badly handicapped. Enemy
forces would be split and encircled. Antwerp would be taken,
leaving the enemy without an escape route.

By this time, the enemy was already on German soil in the west.
By mid-September, American soldiers from the 1st US Army had
penetrated the Westwall and reached the outskirts of Aachen, which
was finally taken on 21 October.

A few days earlier, the enemy had also burst into German
territory in the east. On 16 October, the ‘3rd White Russian Front’,
led by General Ivan Tscherniakowski, had broken through into East
Prussia as far as Nemmersdorf, Goldap — the first sizeable town in
the province — and the fringes of Gumbinnen, heading for
Konigsberg. The roads were full of refugees fleeing in panic from
the oncoming Russians. The Red Army was within striking reach of
Fuhrer Headquarters. For the time being, Hitler resisted pressure to
leave the Wolf ’s Lair. A move to the Berghof or to Berlin, he
thought, would send the wrong signals to his fighting men at the
front. He gave strict instructions that there should be no talk of
leaving. But the staff was reduced, while Schaub packed all Hitler’s
files and possessions, ready to depart at any moment. It proved
possible to delay the moment. Gumbinnen was recaptured —
revealing horrifying scenes of atrocities (including untold cases of
women raped and murdered, and houses plundered at will by Soviet
troops). The Red Army was forced on the defensive in East Prussia.
Goldap, too, was retaken by the Wehrmacht a fortnight or so later.
The immediate danger was contained.

When Nicolaus von Below returned to the Wolf’s Lair on 24
October, after recuperating for several weeks from the effects of the
bomb-blast on 20 July, he found the Dictator heavily involved in
preparations for the Ardennes offensive, expected to take place in
late November or early December. The big anxiety, as ever, was
whether by then the Luftwaffe would be in any position to provide
the necessary air cover. The failure of the Luftwaffe, Below was told
by naval adjutant Karl-Jesko von Puttkamer, was still the ‘number
one topic’, and there was permanent tension between Hitler and
Goring. Though he put the best face on it, Hitler was well aware
that air-power was his weakest suit; hence, the constant tirades

against Goring. The odds in the coming offensive were far more
heavily stacked against him than he was prepared to acknowledge.

Immersed in military matters and facing calamity on all sides,
Hitler was in no mood to travel through a war-weary Reich to
address the party’s Old Guard as usual on 8 November, the
anniversary of the putsch in 1923 and the most sacred date in the
Nazi calendar. Instead, a pale shadow of the normal event was
scheduled to take place for the first time not on the actual
anniversary of the putsch, but on the following Sunday, 12
November, in Munich. Its centrepiece was a proclamation by Hitler
to be read out by Himmler. As Goebbels pointed out, this had
nothing like the effect of hearing Hitler himself, particularly when
read out in Himmler’s cold diction.

The proclamation itself could only have been a disappointment
for those hoping for news of some reversal of war fortunes or — the
desire of most people — a hint that the war would soon be over. It
offered no more than the old refrain that eventual triumph would
come. And Hitler made it clear that as long as he was alive, there
would be no capitulation, no end to the fighting. He was, he said,
‘unshakeable in his will to give the world to follow a no less
praiseworthy example in this struggle than great Germans have
given in the past’. It was a veiled hint that what now remained for
him to fight for was his place in history. The ‘heroic’ struggle he
envisaged, one of Wagnerian proportions, ruled out any
contemplation of capitulation, the shameful act of 1918. The fight
to the last, it seemed clear, was destined to drag down to
destruction the German people itself with the ‘heroic’ self-
destruction of its warlord.

The warlord’s own end was now starting to occupy his mind.
Perhaps a renewed bout of illness, now affecting his throat,
prompted his depressed mood. It may also have encouraged him to
agree with Bormann that the time had indeed finally come to move
his headquarters from East Prussia, since it had been established
that he needed a minor operation in Berlin to remove a polyp from
his vocal cords. On the afternoon of 20 November, Hitler and his

entourage boarded his special train bound for Berlin and left the
Wolf ’s Lair for good.

So little was Hitler a real presence for the German people by this
time that, as Goebbels had to note, rumours were rife that he was
seriously ill, or even dead. Goebbels had the opportunity to speak at
length with him at the beginning of December. He found him
recovered from his stomach troubles, able to eat and drink normally
again. He was also over the operation to his vocal cords, and his
voice was back to normal. Hitler told him he had come to Berlin to
prepare for the coming attack in the west. Everything was prepared
for a major blow to the Allies which would give him not just a
military but also a political success. He said he had worked day and
night on the plan for the offensive, also during his illness. Goebbels
thought Hitler back to his old form.

Hitler outlined the grandiose aim of the offensive. Antwerp
would be taken within eight to ten days. The intention was to smash
the entire enemy force to the north and south, then turn a massive
rocket attack on London. A major success would have a huge impact
on morale at home, and affect attitudes towards Germany abroad.
Hitler, in Goebbels’s judgement, was like a man revived. The
prospect of a new offensive, and of regaining the initiative, had
evidently worked on him like a drug.

Operational plans for the Ardennes offensive had been devised by
the OKW in September and put to Hitler on 9 October. The
objective of the operation — the sweep through the Eifel and
Ardennes through Belgium to the Channel coast, taking Antwerp —
was finalized at this point. The detailed plans of the offensive were
outlined by Jodl to senior western commanders on 3 November.
Sixteen divisions, eight of them armoured, would form the focal
point of the attack. SS-Oberstgruppenftihrer Sepp Dietrich would
lead the 6th SS-Panzer Army; General Hasso von Manteuffel the 5th
Panzer Army. Without exception, the assembled military
commanders thought the objective — the taking of Antwerp, some
125 miles away — quite unrealistic. The forces available to them
were simply inadequate, they argued, especially in winter

conditions. At best, they claimed, a more limited objective —
recovery of Aachen and the adjacent parts of the Westwall, with
perhaps the base being laid for a later westward push — might be
attained. Jodl ruled out the objections. He made clear to the
commanders that limited gains would not suffice. Hitler had to be in
a position, as a result of the offensive, to ‘make the western powers
ready to negotiate’. On 10 November, Hitler signed the order for
the offensive. He acknowledged in the preamble that he was
prepared ‘to accept the maximum risk in order to proceed with this
operation’.

Hitler left Berlin on the evening of 10 December and moved his
headquarters to Ziegenberg, not far from Bad Nauheim, close to the
western front. Bunkers and barracks had been constructed in a
woodland area by the Organization Todt earlier in the war.
Rundstedt and his staff were quartered in a stately residence nearby.

In two groups, on the day of his arrival, 11 December, and again
the following day, Hitler spoke to his military commanders at the
‘Adlerhorst’ (‘Eagle’s Eyrie’), as the new headquarters were called,
to brief them on the coming offensive. After a lengthy preamble
giving his own account of the background to the war, he outlined
his thinking behind the offensive. Psychological considerations, as
always, were paramount for Hitler. War could only be endured as
long as there was hope of victory. It was necessary, therefore, to
destroy this hope through offensive action. A defensive strategy
could not achieve this goal. It had to be followed by successful
attack. ‘I have striven, therefore, from the beginning to conduct the
war wherever possible in the offensive,’ he stated. ‘Wars are finally
decided through the recognition by one side or the other that the
war as such can no longer be won. To get the enemy to realize this
is therefore the most important task.’ If forced back on to the
defensive, it was all the more important to convince the enemy that
victory was not in sight. Hitler came to another unalterable premiss
of his conduct of the war. ‘It is also important to strengthen these
psychological factors in letting no moment pass without making
plain to the enemy that whatever he does he can never reckon with

capitulation, never, never. That is the decisive point.’ He referred,
almost inevitably, to the reversal of Frederick the Great’s fortunes
in the Seven Years War. Here, he had reached another constant in
his thinking: the will of the heroic leader, which alone made
triumph out of adversity possible when all around him despaired of
success.

This brought him to the fragility (he thought) of the coalition he
was facing. ‘If a few really heavy blows were inflicted,’ he argued,
‘it could happen any moment that this artificially sustained common
front could suddenly collapse with a huge clap of thunder.’ The
tensions between the Soviet and western Allies had, indeed, become
more apparent during the second half of 1944. But Hitler was
certainly rational enough to know that his own destruction, and that
of the regime he headed, provided sufficient common ground to
hold the coalition together until Germany’s defeat. He knew, too,
that neither the western Allies nor — despite what Oshima had told
him — the Soviets would look for peace with Germany while they
were militarily so totally in the ascendancy.

As the supreme propagandist of old, he could always summon up
absolute conviction when addressing an audience and needing to
persuade them that what he was proposing was the only alternative
on offer. It had proved his greatest strength since the early 1920s.
The hints of pessimism — or greater realism — to Below and others in
the weeks before the Ardennes offensive, even though only
momentary slips of his guard, suggest, however, that Hitler was
well aware of the size of the gamble in the Ardennes. He had to
take it because, indeed, from his perspective, there was no
alternative way out. If the long-shot were to come off, he reasoned,
and a serious defeat were to be inflicted on the western powers
while new German weaponry started to come into operation and
before the expected Soviet winter offensive could begin, then new
options could open up. At any rate, the only alternative to the
gamble, as he saw it, was to fight for every inch of German soil in a
rearguard struggle certain ultimately to end not just in defeat but in

Germany’s total destruction — and his own. The gamble had to be
taken.

‘Operation Autumn Mist’ — the Ardennes offensive — began in the
early morning of 16 December. All possible reserves had been
mustered. Around 200,000 German troops backed by 600 tanks
were launched against a front comprising around 80,000 American
soldiers with 400 tanks. The weather was perfect for the German
attack, with heavy cloud hindering enemy aircraft. The American
forces were taken by surprise. Sepp Dietrich’s SS-Panzer Army soon
encountered strong defence on the north of the front and could
make only slow progress. Manteuffel’s 5th Panzer Army broke
through in the south, however, and pressed forward in a deep cut of
some sixty-five miles to within a few miles of the river Meuse,
laying siege to the town of Bastogne, an important communications
point. But Bastogne held out, tying down three German divisions in
the process before eventually being relieved by General Patton’s 3rd
US Army.

Manteuffel’s advance had meanwhile slowed, handicapped by
difficult terrain, bad weather, broken bridges, and fuel shortages as
well as increasingly stiff American resistance. On 24 December, the
weather lifted, exposing the German troops to relentless air attacks
by some 5,000 Allied aircraft. Troop movements could now only
take place at night. Supply-lines and German airfields were heavily
bombed. German fighters suffered serious losses. Once Patton had
broken through the German front to relieve Bastogne on 26
December, Manteuffel had to give up any hopes of advancing
further. ‘Operation Autumn Mist’ had failed.

Hitler was still not prepared, however, to bow to the inevitable.
As a diversion, he ordered a subsidiary offensive in the north of
Alsace (‘Operation North Wind’). The aim was to cut off and destroy
the American forces in the north-eastern corner of Alsace, enabling
Manteuffel to continue the main offensive in the Ardennes. Once
more Hitler addressed the commanders of the operation. And once
more he laid the stress on the all-or-nothing nature of the struggle
for Germany’s existence. Again, he ruled out the possibility of

Germany fighting indefinitely a defensive war. For strategic and
psychological reasons it was essential to return to the offensive, and
to seize the initiative. The operation would be decisive, he claimed.
Its success would automatically remove the threat to the southern
part of the Ardennes offensive, and with that the Wehrmacht would
have forced the enemy out of half of the western front. ‘Then we'll
want to have a further look,’ he added.

One slip of the tongue seemed to reveal, however, his realization
that the ambitious aim he had placed in the Ardennes offensive
could no longer be attained; that he knew he could no longer force
the Allies off the Continent; and that, therefore, defensive
operations would have to continue in the west as in the east. He
spoke at one point of ‘the unshakeable aim’ of the operation as
producing merely ‘in part’ a ‘cleansing’ of the situation in the west.
It implied that his speech to the commanders had been little more
than the elevation of hope over reason.

‘North Wind’ began on New Year’s Day. It was Hitler’s last
offensive — and his least effective. German troops were able to
advance no more than about twenty kilometres, making a few
minor gains and causing Eisenhower to pull back forces in the
Strasbourg area for a time. But the offensive was too weak to have
much effect. It proved possible to halt it without the Americans
having to withdraw troops from the Ardennes. ‘North Wind’ had
proved to be little more than a momentary stiff breeze.

Even more devastating was the death-blow to the Luftwaffe,
imparted on 1 January, the same day that ‘North Wind’ had
commenced. It had finally proved possible to launch a German air-
offensive — though with disastrous consequences. Around 800
German fighters and bombers engaged in mass attacks on Allied
airfields in northern France, Belgium, and Holland. They succeeded
in destroying or seriously damaging almost 300 planes, limiting
Allied air-power for a week or more. But 277 German planes were
also lost. There was no possibility of the Luftwaffe recovering from
such losses. It was effectively at an end.

On New Year’s Day 1945, German radios broadcast Hitler’s
traditional address to the German people. It held nothing new for
them. Hitler offered them not a sentence on the effect of ‘wonder
weapons’, steps to counter the terror from the skies, or anything
specific on military progress on the fronts. Above all, he gave no
hint that the end of the war was near. He spoke only of its
continuation in 1945 and until a final victory — which by now only
dreamers could imagine — was attained. His audience had heard it
all many times before: the reaffirmation that ‘a 9 November in the
German Reich will never repeat itself’; that Germany’s enemies, led
by ‘the Jewish-international world conspiracy’, intended to
‘eradicate’ its people; that Germany’s plight had been caused by the
weakness of its allies; that the combined effort of front and
homeland showed the ‘essence of our social community’ and an
indomitable spirit, incapable of destruction; and that ‘the Jewish-
international world enemy’ would not only fail in its attempt ‘to
destroy Europe and eradicate its peoples, but would bring about its
own destruction’.

Few remained convinced. Many, like some observers in the
Stuttgart area, were probably ready to acknowledge that ‘the Fithrer
has worked for war from the very beginning’. Far from being the
genius of Goebbels’s propaganda, such observers remarked, Hitler
had ‘intentionally unleashed this world conflagration in order to be
proclaimed as the great “transformer of mankind” ’. It was belated
recognition of the catastrophic impact of the leader they had earlier
supported, cheered, eulogized. Their backing had helped to put him
in the position where his power over the German state was total. By
now, in the absence of either the ability or the readiness —
especially since the events of 20 July — of those with access to the
corridors of power to defy his authority, let alone oust him, this
man quite simply held the fate of the German people in his own
hands. He had again avowed, as he always had done, his adamant
refusal to contemplate capitulation in any event. This meant that
the suffering of the German people — and of the countless victims of
the regime they had at one time so enthusiastically supported — had

to go on. It would cease, it was abundantly clear, only when Hitler
himself ceased to exist. And that could only mean Germany’s total
defeat, ruin, and occupation.

With the petering out of the Ardennes offensive, all hope of
repelling the relentless advance from the west was gone. And in the
east, the Red Army was waiting for the moment to launch its winter
offensive. Hitler was compelled by 3 January to accept that
‘continuation of the originally planned operation [in the Ardennes]
no longer has any prospect of success’. Five days later came the
tacit acknowledgement that his last gamble had been a losing throw
of the dice with his approval of the withdrawal of the 6th Panzer
Army to the north-west of Bastogne, and next day, his order to pull
back his SS panzer divisions from the front. On 14 January, the day
before Hitler left his headquarters on the western front to return to
Berlin, the High Command of the Wehrmacht acknowledged that
‘the initiative in the area of the offensive has passed to the enemy’.

Hitler had stated categorically in his briefings before the
Ardennes and Alsace offensives that Germany could not indefinitely
sustain a defensive war. By now, he had used up his last precious
reserves of manpower, lost untold quantities of weaponry, and
exhausted his remaining divisions in an offensive that had cost the
lives of about 80,000 German soldiers (at the same time weakening
the eastern front and paving the way for the rapid inroads of the
Red Army in the coming weeks). He had also seen the remnants of
the Luftwaffe devastated to the point of no return; while rapidly
dwindling supplies of fuel and other supplies essential for the war
effort held out in any case the prospect of continuing the struggle
only for a few more months. The logic was plain: the last faint
glimmer of hope had been extinguished, the last exit route cut off.
Defeat was inevitable. Hitler had not lost touch with reality. He
realized this. Below found him one evening after the failure of the
offensive in his bunker after air-raid sirens had sounded, deeply
depressed. He spoke of taking his own life since the last chance of
success had evaporated. He was savage in his criticism of the failure
of the Luftwaffe, and of the ‘traitors’ in the army. According to

Below’s later recollection, Hitler said: ‘I know the war is lost. The
superior power is too great. I’ve been betrayed. Since 20 July
everything has come out that I didn’t think possible. Precisely those
were against me who have profited most from National Socialism. I
spoilt them all and decorated them. That’s the thanks. I’d like most
of all to put a bullet through my head.’ But, as so often, Hitler
rapidly pulled himself together, saying: ‘We’ll not capitulate. Never.
We can go down. But we'll take a world with us.’

This was what kept him going. It had underpinned his political
‘career’ since the beginning. There would be no repeat of 1918: no
stab-in-the-back; no capitulation. That — and his place in history as a
German hero brought down by weakness and betrayal — was all that
was left to him.

27
Into the Abyss

Hitler was still reeling from the failure of the Ardennes offensive,
his last big hope, when all hell broke loose on the eastern front. The
Soviet offensive had started. The main thrust, from bridgeheads on
the Vistula, south of Warsaw, was aimed at southern Poland, then
on to the vital Silesian industrial belt, and the river Oder, the last
barrier before Berlin. Marshal Ivan Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front
began the attack on 12 January, following a five-hour artillery
barrage, from the Baranov bridgehead on the southern Vistula. It
was rapidly followed, farther to the north, from the bridgeheads at
Polavy and Magnuszev, by an assault from Marshal Georgi Zhukov’s
1st Belorussian Front. A secondary thrust, by the 2nd and 3rd
Belorussian Fronts, from bridgeheads on the river Narev to the
north of Warsaw, aimed at cutting off German troops in East
Prussia.

The Red Army’s superiority in numbers was overwhelming. In the
vital central sector of the 900-kilometre front that stretched from
the Carpathians to the Baltic, some 2,200,000 Soviet troops were
arrayed against 400,000 on the German side. But at the key
bridgeheads on the Vistula, from where the offensive was launched,
the imbalance was massive. The German general staff calculated
that it was 11 to 1 in infantry, 7 to 1 in tanks, and 20 to 1 in guns in
favour of the Red Army. Aware from the reports of General
Reinhard Gehlen, head of ‘Foreign Armies East’ department, of the
huge build-up of Soviet forces and of an impending offensive,
Guderian had pleaded with Hitler at Christmas, when the Ardennes
offensive had already lost impetus, to transfer troops to the east.

Hitler had dismissed Gehlen’s reports as enemy bluff, ‘the greatest
imposture since Genghis Khan’. When, on a further visit to Fuhrer
Headquarters at Ziegenberg on New Year’s Day 1945 Guderian had
wrung the release of four divisions out of Hitler, the Dictator
insisted they be sent to Hungary, not to the centre of the eastern
front where military intelligence was pointing to the looming peril.
On 9 January, Guderian had made a further trip to Ziegenberg to
show Hitler diagrams and charts displaying the relative strength of
forces in the vulnerable areas on the Vistula. Hitler, in a rage,
rejected them as ‘completely idiotic’, and told Guderian that
whoever had compiled them should be shut up in a lunatic asylum.
Guderian defended Gehlen and stood his ground. The storm
subsided as rapidly as it had blown up. But Hitler nevertheless
contemptuously refused the urgent recommendations to evacuate
parts of the Vistula and Narev, withdraw to more defensible
positions, and transfer forces from the west to shore up these weak
points of the front. Guderian remarked, prophetically: ‘The Eastern
Front is like a house of cards. If the front is broken through at one
point, all the rest will collapse.’ Hitler’s reply was that ‘The Eastern
Front must help itself and make do with what it’s got.’ As Guderian
later commented, it was an ‘ostrich strategy’.

A week later, on 16 January, with the Red Army already making
massive advances, Hitler, now back in Berlin, was finally prepared
to transfer troops from west to east. But Guderian was outraged to
learn that Sepp Dietrich’s 6th Panzer Army — brought back from the
unsuccessful Ardennes campaign and forming the bulk of the new
forces available — was to be sent to Hungary, where Hitler was
hoping to force the Russians back across the Danube and relieve
Budapest. With German synthetic oil-plants destroyed by air-raids in
mid-January, retention of the Hungarian oil-fields and refineries
was, for him, the vital consideration. Without them, he argued, the
German war effort was doomed anyway. Nor did Guderian have
much success in trying to persuade Hitler to evacuate by sea over
the Baltic the German troops in grave danger of being cut off in
Courland, on the tip of Latvia, for redeployment on the eastern

front. Donitz had been instrumental in persuading Hitler that
Courland was a vital coastal area for the new U-boats which, he
claimed, were almost ready to be turned against the West. The
consequence was that 200,000 desperately needed troops were tied
up in Courland until Germany’s capitulation in May.

As Guderian had predicted, the Wehrmacht was wholly incapable
of blocking the Red Army’s advance. By 17 January, the Soviet
troops had steamrollered over the troops in their path. The way to
the German frontier now lay open before them. Overhead, Soviet
planes controlled the skies, strafing and bombing at will. Some
German divisions were surrounded; others retreated westward as
fast as they could go. Warsaw was evacuated by the remaining
German forces on 17 January, driving Hitler into such a paroxysm
of rage that, at a critical point of the advance when they were
needed for vital military operations, he had several officers from
the General Staff who had issued signals connected with the
withdrawal from Warsaw arrested and — together with Guderian
himself — interrogated for hours by the head of the Reich Security
Head Office, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, and chief of the Gestapo,
Heinrich Miller.

On 18 January, Soviet troops entered Budapest. The battles in the
city would last until mid-February, bitter fighting around Lake
Balaton and in other parts of Hungary for several weeks longer. But
however much weight Hitler attached to it, the uneven contest
could have only one outcome. And Hungary formed little more than
a sideshow to the major catastrophe for the Reich unfolding to the
north, where Soviet troops encountered little serious opposition as
they advanced at great speed through Poland. Lodz was taken. The
towns of Kalisz and Posen in the Warthegau were already in their
sights. On 20 January, they crossed the German border in the Posen
area and in Silesia.

Still further north, German forces were in disarray in the face of
Soviet advances into East Prussia. Colonel-General Hans Reinhardt,
commander of Army Group Centre which was defending East
Prussia, was sacked by a raging Hitler for evacuating coastal

positions when Soviet troops broke through on 26 January, cutting
off two German armies. General Friedrich Hofsbach, commanding
the 4th Army, was also peremptorily dismissed by a furious Hitler
for ignoring orders to hold ground — and not consulting his Army
Group about his decision — when faced with a hopeless position and
in grave danger of encirclement. In a wild temper, Hitler accused
both Reinhardt and Hof&bach of treason. But a change of personnel —
the capable Austrian Colonel-General Lothar Rendulic in place of
Reinhardt, and General Friedrich-Wilhelm Miller for Hof$bach —
could do nothing to alter the disastrous German collapse in the face
of hopeless odds, in East Prussia as on the rest of the eastern front.
This proved equally true in Hitler’s replacement on 17 January of
Colonel-General Josef Harpe, made the scapegoat for the collapse of
the Vistula front, by his favourite, Colonel-General Ferdinand
Schorner, and his ill-judged appointment on 25 January of
Reichsftihrer-SS Heinrich Himmler, in the teeth of Guderian’s
strident objections, to take command of the newly formed and
hastily constituted Army Group Vistula, which aimed to stave off
the Soviet advance into Pomerania. The hope that ‘triumph of the
will’ and the toughness of one of his most trusted ‘hard’ men would
prevail rapidly proved ill-founded. Himmler, backed by courageous
but militarily inexperienced Waffen-SS officers, soon found that
combating the might of the Red Army was a far stiffer task than
rounding up and persecuting helpless political opponents and ‘racial
inferiors’. By mid-February, Hitler was forced to concede that Army
Group Vistula was inadequately led. After a furious row with
Guderian lasting two hours, Hitler suddenly backed down and
assigned General Walther Wenck to Himmler’s headquarters to take
over effective command of the planned limited counter-offensive on
the Oder in Pomerania. The Reichsftihrer-SS’s failure as a military
commander would finally — and belatedly — be recognized by Hitler
in his replacement by Colonel-General Gotthard Heinrici on 20
March. It marked a significant point in the growing estrangement of
Hitler and his SS chief.

The catastrophe on the eastern front was by that time well-nigh
complete. In the south, fired by the fanatical Nazi leadership of
Gauleiter Karl Hanke, Breslau held out under siege until early May.
Glogau, to the north-west, also continued to resist. But the defiance
was Of little military significance. By the end of January, the key
industrial region of Silesia was lost to Germany. By 23 January
Russian troops had already reached the Oder between Oppeln and
Ohlau; five days later, they crossed it at Steinau, south of Breslau.
Further north, Posen was encircled and most of the Warthegau lost.
Its Gauleiter, Arthur Greiser, one of Hitler’s most brutal henchmen,
who had imposed a reign of terror on the predominantly Polish
population of his fiefdom, had already fled westwards, along with
other Nazi leaders from the region, in an attempt — ultimately to
prove futile — to save his own skin. His flight, like that of other
party representatives, fuelled the anger and contempt of ordinary
people at the behaviour of Nazi bigwigs.

By the first days of February, Soviet troops had established a
bridgehead over the Oder between Ktistrin and Frankfurt an der
Oder. Even now, Hitler, waving his fists in a frenzy of rage, refused
to listen to Guderian’s entreaties to evacuate forthwith the military
outposts in the Balkans, Italy, Norway, and, especially, Courland to
free up reserves to defend the capital. All that Guderian could
muster was poured into a short-lived German counter-offensive in
Pomerania in mid-February. Easily fending this off, the Red Army
occupied practically the whole of Pomerania during February and
early March. Though the surrounded Konigsberg was still holding
out, most of East Prussia was by now also in Soviet hands.

The immense Soviet gains of January had by then been
consolidated, and even extended. Zhukov’s men had advanced
almost 300 miles since the middle of January. From the bridgehead
on the Oder near Kiistrin, Berlin lay open to attack, only forty or so
miles away. The last obstacle en route to the capital had been
surmounted. But the rapidity of the advance had meant that Soviet
supply-lines lagged behind. They needed to be assembled across the
wrecked transport routes of a battered Poland. Soviet strategists

reckoned, furthermore, that wet spring weather was certain to
hamper military manoeuvres. And it was plain that the bloody
battles in store to take Berlin would require detailed preparation.
The final assault on the capital, they concluded, could wait for the
time being.

While this disaster of colossal proportions was unfolding on the
eastern front, the Allies in the west were swiftly reasserting
themselves after staving off the Ardennes offensive. By early
February, some 2 million American, British, Canadian, and French
soldiers were ready for the assault on Germany. The attack of the
Canadian 1st Army, which began on 8 February south of Nijmegen
in the Wesel direction, met stiff opposition and could at first
advance only slowly, amid bitter fighting. But in the last week of
the month, American troops to the south-west pushed rapidly
forwards towards Cologne, reaching the Rhine south of Dusseldorf
on 2 March and the outskirts of Cologne three days later. Hitler’s
dismissal — again — of Field-Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt,
Commander-in-Chief in the West, who had tried in vain to persuade
him to withdraw his forces behind the Rhine, and replacement on
10 March by Field-Marshal Albert Kesselring, the former tenacious
defender of German positions in Italy, made no difference.

Retreating German troops had blown up the Rhine bridges
everywhere as they went — except Remagen, between Bonn and
Koblenz, which was discovered intact, as the retreating Germans
failed to detonate in time the explosives they had laid, and
immediately secured by American forces of the 1st US Army under
General Courtney H. Hodges on 7 March. With a bridgehead swiftly
established, the last natural barrier in the way of the western Allies
had been crossed. Within a fortnight, American troops had again
crossed the Rhine at Oppenheim, south of Mainz. By then, the banks
of the Rhine between Koblenz and Ludwigshafen were under
American control. Further north, Montgomery now enjoyed a
staged moment of glory as, watched by Churchill and Eisenhower,
his troops crossed the Lower Rhine on 23-24 March following a
massive air and artillery assault on Wesel. The most serious German

resistance had by now been largely overcome. A third of all the
German forces arrayed on the western front had been lost since
early February — 293,000 men captured, 60,000 killed or wounded.
Hitler’s insistence on refusing to concede any territory west of the
Rhine, rather than retreating to fight from behind the river, as
Rundstedt had recommended, had itself contributed significantly to
the magnitude and speed of the Allied success.

As German defences were collapsing on both eastern and western
fronts and enemy forces prepared to strike at the very heart of the
Reich, German cities as well as military installations and fuel plants
were being subjected to the most ferocious bombing of the entire
war. Pressed by the British Air Chief Marshal Arthur Harris’s
Bomber Command, the American and British chiefs of staff had
agreed by the end of January to exploit the shock of the Soviet
offensive by extending the planned air-attacks on strategic targets —
mainly oil-plants and transport interchanges — to include the area-
bombing and destruction of Berlin, Leipzig, Dresden, and other
cities in central and eastern Germany. The aim was to intensify the
mounting chaos in the big urban centres in the east of the Reich, as
thousands of refugees fled westwards from the path of the Red
Army. In addition, the western Allies were keen to demonstrate to
Stalin, about to meet Churchill and Roosevelt at Yalta, that they
were lending support to the Soviet offensive through their bombing
campaign. The result was to magnify massively the terror from the
skies as the bombs rained down on near-defenceless citizens.
Beyond the forty-three large-scale precision attacks on Magdeburg,
Gelsenkirchen, Botrop, Leuna, Ludwigshafen, and other targeted
installations that laid waste Germany’s fuel production, massive
raids directed at civilian centres of population turned German inner-
cities into wastelands. Berlin was hit on 3 February by the most
damaging raid it had suffered so far during the war, killing 3,000
and injuring a further 2,000 people. Some of its poorer inner-city
areas suffered most. Ten days later, on the night of 13-14 February,
the beautiful city of Dresden, the glittering cultural capital of
Saxony, renowned for its fine china but scarcely a major industrial

centre, and now teeming with refugees, was turned into a towering
inferno as thousands of incendiaries and explosive bombs were
dropped by waves of RAF Lancaster bombers (followed next day by
a further massive raid by American B-17s). Up to 40,000 citizens are
estimated to have lost their lives in the most ruthless display
experienced of Allied air superiority and strength. Other devastated
cities included Essen, Dortmund, Mainz, Munich, Nuremberg, and
Wurzburg. In the last four and a half months of the war, 471,000
tons of bombs were dropped on Germany, double the amount
during the entire year of 1943. In March alone, almost three times
as many bombs were dispatched as during the whole of the year
1942.

By that time, Germany — militarily and economically — was on its
knees. But as long as Hitler lived, there could be no prospect of
surrender.

The man at the centre of the rapidly imploding system that had
unleashed unprecedented horror and misery on the countless victims
of the Nazi regime boarded his special train at Ziegenberg, his
western headquarters, on the evening of 15 January 1945 and, with
his regular entourage of orderlies, secretaries, and adjutants, left for
Berlin. His hopes of military success in the west were definitively at
an end. Trying to stave off the Soviet offensive in the east was now
the urgent priority. His departure had been prompted by Guderian’s
opposition to his order on 15 January to transfer the powerful
Panzer Corps ‘Grofgdeutschland’ from East Prussia to the vicinity of
Kielce in Poland, where the Red Army was threatening to break
through and expose the way forward through the Warthegau. Not
only, Guderian pointed out, was the manoeuvre impossible to
execute in time to block the Soviet advance; it would at the same
time gravely weaken the defences of East Prussia just as the Soviet
attack from the Narev was placing that province in the utmost peril.
As it was, the ‘Grofgdeutschland’ troops sat in railway sidings while

the Fithrer and his Chief of the General Staff argued on the
telephone about their deployment. Hitler would not rescind his
order. But the dispute helped to persuade him that he needed to
direct affairs at closer quarters. It was time to move back to Berlin.

His train, its blinds down, pulled into the capital that night.
Triumphant arrivals in Berlin were no more than distant memories.
As his car made its way amid the rubble through unlit streets to the
Reich Chancellery — now cold and dismal, its pictures, carpets, and
tapestries removed to safety in view of the increasing air-raids on
Berlin — few inhabitants of the city even knew he had returned;
probably still fewer cared. Hitler in any case had no wish to see
them. The path to his portals was blocked for all but the few who
had the requisite papers and passes to satisfy the intense scrutiny of
SS guards armed with machine guns and posted at a series of
security checks. Even the Chief of the General Staff had to surrender
his weapons and have his briefcase meticulously examined.

Hitler was completely immersed during the next days in the
events on the eastern front. Seemingly incapable of acknowledging
the objective imbalances in forces and the tactical weaknesses which
had left the Vistula front so exposed, he thought he scented betrayal
at every point. Frequent rantings about the incompetence or
treachery of his generals dragged out the twice-daily military
briefings to inordinate length. Guderian reckoned that his trips from
General Staff Headquarters at Zossen, south of Berlin, twice a day
took up around three hours. A further four to six hours were
consumed during the conferences themselves. From the Chief of
Staff ’s point of view, it was time wasted.

The regular clashes between Hitler and his one-time admirer
Guderian reflected what were by now wholly and irreconcilably
conflicting philosophies with no middle-ground between them. For
Hitler, capitulation could not be contemplated, even if the price was
the total destruction of Germany. For the Chief of Staff, the
destruction of Germany must be prevented, even if the price was
capitulation — at any rate, in the west. Guderian — and he was far
from alone in this — saw the only hope of preventing the complete

destruction of Germany as putting everything into blocking the
Soviet onslaught and at the same time opening negotiations for an
armistice with the West, however poor the bargaining base. Perhaps
the West could be persuaded that it was in its own interests to
prevent Russian dominance of a post-war Germany by accepting the
surrender of the western parts of the country to enable the Reich to
defend its eastern borders.

This was the proposition that Guderian outlined on 23 January to
Dr Paul Barandon, the Foreign Ministry’s new liaison with the army.
It was a faint hope but, as Guderian noted, drowning men clutch at
straws. He hoped that Barandon would engineer for him an
audience with Ribbentrop, and that the Foreign Minister and he
could approach Hitler immediately with a view to ending the war.
Barandon arranged the interview. Ribbentrop, when Guderian met
him two days later, seemed shocked at the prospect of the Russians
at the gates of Berlin within a few weeks. But he declared himself a
loyal follower of the Fuhrer, knew the latter’s antipathy to any
peace feelers, and was unwilling to support Guderian. As Guderian
entered the briefing room that evening, he heard Hitler in a loud
and agitated voice say: ‘So when the Chief of the General Staff goes
to see the Foreign Minister and informs him of the situation in the
East with the object of securing an armistice in the West, he is
doing neither more nor less than committing high treason!’
Ribbentrop had, of course, promptly reported to Hitler the content
of his talks with Guderian. No action followed. But it was a warning
shot across the bows. ‘I forbid most decisively generalizations and
conclusions about the overall situation,’ Speer recalled Hitler
ranting. ‘That remains my business. Anyone in future claiming to
another person that the war is lost will be treated as a traitor to his
country with all the consequences for him and his family. I will act
without respect for position and standing.’ The head of the Security
Police, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, from now on sat silently but
menacingly in the background during the briefing sessions.

In fact, despite this outburst — and Ribbentrop’s refusal to
entertain Guderian’s suggestion — Hitler was aware in early 1945 of

his Foreign Minister’s extremely tentative feelers via Stockholm,
Bern, and Madrid to the western Allies to end the war with
Germany and join the fight against Bolshevism. He knew, too, of
Ribbentrop’s consideration of an alternative suggestion:
approaching the Soviet Union to help crush Britain. Hitler had first
opposed any idea of peace feelers. Then he appeared to change his
mind. ‘Nothing will come of it,’ Hitler told Ribbentrop. ‘But if you
really want, you can try it.” However, not only was there no
prospect of either the Soviets or the western Allies showing genuine
readiness to enter peace negotiations at this stage; Ribbentrop knew
that Hitler had not the slightest wish to pursue them. A premiss of
any peace-talks, as Hitler well realized, would have been his own
removal. That in itself was sufficient to make him dismiss in fury
any idea of negotiations. As the Foreign Minister himself later
remarked, Hitler ‘regarded any peace feeler as a sign of weakness’.
His soundings, so he said, merely ‘showed that no serious peace talk
was possible’ as long as Hitler lived.

This was equally plain to Goebbels. The Propaganda Minister was
approached by Goring at the end of January, disconsolate at events
in the east and despairing of Germany’s military chances. Goring
was prepared, he said, to use his Swedish contacts to put out feelers
to Britain and sought the help of Goebbels in persuading Hitler that,
since any overtures from Ribbentrop (regarded with utter contempt
by the Reich Marshal as well as the Propaganda Minister) were
doomed to failure, he should try this avenue. Goebbels was not
encouraging. Privately, he was unwilling to push the case with
Hitler since he ran the risk of losing the Fithrer’s confidence, which,
he added pointedly, ‘is indeed the entire basis of my work’. In any
case, Goring could only act, he noted, with Hitler’s approval ‘and
the Filhrer won’t grant him such approval’. Goring thought Hitler
too intransigent, and wondered whether he wanted a political
solution at all. He did, replied Goebbels, but ‘the Fuhrer does not
see such a possibility existing at present’.

Hitler’s lingering hopes, as ever, were in a split in the alliance
against him. If Britain and the USA wanted to prevent a

bolshevization of Europe, he told Goebbels, they would have to turn
to Germany for help. The coalition had to break; it was a matter of
holding out until the moment arrived. Goebbels privately thought
Hitler too optimistic.

Jodl and Goring played to this illusion, however, at the military
briefing on 27 January. However gloomy his attitude had been
when speaking to Goebbels, in Hitler’s presence Goring sang to a
different tune. The Soviet advance had unquestionably dashed
British plans, he and Jodl reckoned. Goring thought that if things
went much further they could expect a telegram from the British
saying they were prepared to join forces to prevent a Soviet
occupation of Germany. Hitler suggested the National Committee of
Free Germany, the ‘traitors’ organization’ based in Moscow and
linked with General Seydlitz, from the 6th Army lost at Stalingrad,
could come in useful. He had told Ribbentrop, he said, to filter a
story to the British that the Soviets had trained up 200,000
Communists under the leadership of German officers, ready to
march. The prospect of a Russian-led national government in
Germany would be certain to stir up anxiety in Britain, he averred.
The British did not enter the war to see ‘the East come to the
Atlantic’, Goring added. Hitler commented: ‘English newspapers are
already writing bitterly: what’s the point of the war?’

He nevertheless saw no opening for overtures to his western
enemies, when Goebbels tentatively broached the issue. In
discussions with his Propaganda Minister on successive days at the
end of January, appearing drained with fatigue, he reflected on the
failure of the intended alliance with Britain. This might have been
possible, he thought, had Chamberlain remained Prime Minister.
But it had been totally vitiated by Churchill, ‘the actual father of the
war’. On the other hand, he continued to express admiration for
Stalin’s brutal realism as a revolutionary who knew exactly what he
wanted and had learnt his method of atrocities from Genghis Khan.
Here, too, Hitler dismissed any prospect of negotiations. ‘He
wanted,’ he declared to Goebbels, ‘to prove himself worthy of the
great examples from history.’ Should he succeed in transforming

Germany’s fortunes, thought the Propaganda Minister, without a
trace of cynicism, he would be not only the man of the century, but
of the millennium.

Goebbels continued to find Hitler over-optimistic about the
chances of staving off the Soviet advance. Indeed, however
pessimistic or fatalistic he was in dark moments, Hitler was as yet
far from ready to give up the fight. He spoke of his aims in the
forthcoming offensive in Hungary. Once he was again in possession
of Hungarian oil, he would pour in additional divisions from
Germany to liberate Upper Silesia. The whole operation would take
around two months. The air of unreality did not escape Goebbels. It
would take a great deal of luck to succeed, he noted.

Goebbels had been ‘astonished’ that Hitler, after showing such
repeated reluctance for two years to speak in public, had so readily
taken up a suggestion to broadcast to the nation on 30 January, the
twelfth anniversary of the ‘seizure of power’. Hitler presumably felt
that at such a point of national crisis, with the enemy already deep
inside the Reich, not to have spoken on such an important date in
the Nazi calendar would have sent out the worst possible signals to
the German people. It was imperative that he strengthen the will to
fight, most of all on Germany’s shrinking borders.

His recorded speech, broadcast at 10 p.m. that evening,
amounted to little more than an attempt to stiffen morale, to appeal
to fighting spirit, to demand extreme sacrifice in ‘the most serious
crisis for Europe in many centuries’, and to emphasize his own will
to fight on and refusal to contemplate anything other than victory.
He referred, inevitably, to a ‘Jewish-international world
conspiracy’, to ‘Kremlin Jews’, the ‘spectre of asiatic Bolshevism’,
and of a ‘storm-flood from inner Asia’. But the military disasters of
the previous fortnight were not touched upon with a single word.
And only a single sentence mentioned ‘the horrible fate now taking
place in the east, and eradicating people in their tens and hundreds
of thousands in villages, in the marches, in the country, and in
towns’, which would eventually ‘be fought off and mastered’. The
speech could have appealed to few beyond remaining diehards.

That same day, 30 January, Speer had a memorandum passed to
Hitler. It told him that the war economy and armaments production
were at an end. Following the loss of Upper Silesia, there was no
possibility of meeting the needs of the front in munitions, weapons,
and tanks. ‘The material superiority of the enemy can, accordingly,
no longer be compensated for by the bravery of our soldiers.’
Hitler’s cold response made plain that he did not take kindly to
receiving such reports that smacked of defeatism. He forbade Speer
to pass the memorandum to anyone, adding that conclusions from
the armaments position were his alone to draw. Short of the miracle
for which he was still waiting, it must nevertheless have been
obvious to Hitler, as to all those around him, that Germany could
last out neither economically nor militarily for much longer.

Speer, long after the events, posed the question why even at this
point Hitler was not faced with any joint action from those with
regular contact to him to demand an explanation of how he
intended to bring the war to an end. (He gave no hint of what
might have followed from such an unlikely scenario.) Goring,
Himmler, Ribbentrop, and even in some ways Goebbels, had, after
all, been among the Nazi leaders who at one time or another had
broached the question of peace overtures to the enemy, which
Hitler had repeatedly dismissed out of hand. Now the end was near,
and Germany was facing not just military defeat but total
destruction. ‘Surely something must happen,’ Speer whispered to
Donitz during a briefing in early February, when further disasters
were reported. Donitz replied coolly that he was there only to
represent the navy. The Fuhrer would know what he was doing.

The reply provided at the same time an answer to the question
Speer raised many years later. There was no prospect of any united
front against Hitler even now, and even among those who saw with
crystal clarity the abyss looming before them. The aftermath of the
plot against him the previous year had left none of his entourage in
the slightest doubt of the ruthlessness with which he would turn on
anyone seen as a threat. But the impossibility of any combined front
against Hitler did not rest alone, or even primarily, on fear. The

innermost structure of the regime had long depended upon the way
Hitler could play off his paladins against each other. Their deep
divisions and animosities were reconciled only in their
unquestioning loyalty and adherence to the Leader, from whom all
remaining shreds of power and authority were still drawn. The
Fuhrer cult was still far from dead in this inner part of the
‘charismatic community’. Keitel, Jodl, and Donitz, among the
highest ranks of the military leaders, were still wholly bound to
Hitler, their loyalty unshaken, their admiration undiluted. Goring,
his prestige at rock-bottom, had long since lost all energy to
undertake anything against Hitler, and certainly lacked the will to
do so. The same was true of Ribbentrop, who was in any case
devoid of friends within the Nazi hierarchy and held by most in
contempt as well as loathing. Goebbels, Labour Front leader Robert
Ley, and, not least, the party leader in closest proximity to Hitler,
Martin Bormann, were among the most radical supporters of his
uncompromising line and remained wholly loyal. Speer, for his part,
was — whatever his post-war feelings — one of the least likely to lead
a fronde against Hitler, confront him with an ultimatum, or serve as
focal point of a combined approach to put pressure on him. The
scenario contemplated by Speer long after the events was,
therefore, utterly inconceivable. The ‘charismatic community’ was
compelled by its inner logic to follow the Leader on whom it had
always depended — even when he was visibly taking it to perdition.

Ill

The government quarter of Berlin, like much of the rest of the city,
was already a dismal and depressing sight even before, in broad
daylight on 3 February, a huge American fleet of bombers unleashed
a new hail of destruction from the skies in the heaviest raid of the
war on the Reich capital. The Old Reich Chancellery, the neo-
baroque palace dating back to Bismarck’s time, was ruined, now
little more than an empty shell. The New Reich Chancellery,
designed by Speer, also suffered a number of direct hits. Bormann’s

headquarters in the Party Chancellery were severely damaged, and
other buildings at the hub of the Nazi empire were demolished fully
or in part. The whole area was a mass of rubble. Bomb craters
pitted the Chancellery garden. For a time there was a complete
power-failure, and water was available only from a water-cart
standing in front of the Reich Chancellery. But unlike most of the
population in the bombed-out districts of Berlin and elsewhere, at
least the leaders of the Third Reich could still find alternative
shelter and accommodation, however modest by their standards.

His apartments in the Reich Chancellery largely gutted by
incendiaries, Hitler now moved underground for much of the time,
shuffling down the seemingly unending stone steps, flanked by bare
concrete walls, that led to the claustrophobic, labyrinthine
subterranean world of the Fuhrer Bunker, a two-storey construction
deep below the garden of the Reich Chancellery. The enormous
bunker complex had been deepened in 1943 - extending an earlier
bunker (originally meant for possible future use as an air-raid
shelter) dating from 1936 — and heavily reinforced during Hitler’s
stay at his western headquarters. The complex was completely self-
contained, with its own heating, lighting, and water-pumps run
from a diesel generator. Hitler had slept there since returning to
Berlin. From now on, it would provide a macabre domicile for the
remaining weeks of his life.

The bunker was far removed from the palatial surrounds to which
he had been accustomed since 1933. An attempt to retain a degree
of splendour at least remained in the corridor leading up to his
bunker, which had been converted into a type of waiting-room, laid
with a red carpet, and provided with rows of elegant chairs lined
against walls hung with paintings brought down from his
apartments. From here, a small ante-room gave way to the
curtained entrance to his study. This was only around nine by
twelve feet in size and seemed oppressive. A door on the right
opened on to his bedroom, which had doors leading into a small
briefing room, into his bathroom, and a tiny dressing room (and
from there into what was to become Eva Braun’s bedroom). A

writing-desk, a small sofa, a table, and three armchairs were
squeezed into the study, making it cramped and uncomfortable. A
large portrait of Frederick the Great entirely dominated the room,
offering a constant reminder to Hitler of the seeming rewards for
holding out when all appeared lost until the tide miraculously
turned. ‘When bad news threatens to crush my spirit I derive fresh
courage from the contemplation of this picture,’ Hitler was heard to
remark.

At first, even after he had moved his living quarters into the
bunker, Hitler continued to spend part of the day in the undamaged
wing of the Reich Chancellery. He lunched each day with his
secretaries behind closed curtains in a dingy room lit by electric
light. Since the operations room in the Old Reich Chancellery
building was no longer usable, the afternoon military conferences,
usually beginning about 3 p.m. and lasting two to three hours, were
at this time held around the map-table in Hitler’s imposing study in
the New Reich Chancellery, with its polished floor, thick carpet,
paintings, leather armchairs and couch, and — remarkably - still
intact grey-curtained ceiling-high windows. The circle of
participants had by now been widened to include Bormann,
Himmler, Kaltenbrunner, and often Ribbentrop. Afterwards, Hitler
would usually drink a cup of tea with his secretaries and adjutants
before returning to the safety of his underground abode. For the
evening meal his entourage trekked through kitchens and corridors,
past machine rooms, ventilation shafts, and toilets, through two
heavy iron gates, and down to the Fuhrer Bunker. The first time he
ventured down to visit Hitler, Goebbels spoke of finding his way
through the corridors ‘just like in a maze of trenches’. Over the next
weeks, Hitler transferred almost all of his activities to the bunker,
leaving it only for occasional snatches of fresh air to let Blondi out
for a few minutes in the Chancellery garden or to take lunch with
his secretaries above ground. From then on, he seldom saw
daylight. For him and his ‘court’, spending almost their entire
existence in the confines of the underground headquarters, night
and day lost most of their meaning.

Hitler’s day usually began around this time with the sound of air-
raid sirens in the late morning. Linge was instructed to wake him, if
he were not already awake, at noon, sometimes as late as 1 p.m.
Often — probably affected by the unholy concoction of pills, potions,
and injections he had daily (including stimulants as well as
sedatives) — he had slept, so he claimed, for as little as three hours.
The air-raids made him anxious. He would immediately dress and
shave. The outer appearance of the Fuhrer had to be maintained. He
could not face his entourage unshaven and in night clothes even
during an air-raid. The afternoons were almost exclusively taken up
with lunch and the first of the lengthy twice-daily military briefings.
The evening meal, usually not beginning until eight o’clock,
sometimes later, frequently dragged out until late in the evening.
Hitler sometimes retired for an hour or two, taking a sleep until it
was time for the second military briefing. By now, it was usually 1
a.m. By the end of the briefing — invariably stressful in the extreme
for all who attended, including Hitler himself — he was ready to
slump on the sofa in his room. He was not too tired, however, to
hold forth to his secretaries and other members of his close circle,
summoned to join him for tea in the middle of the night. He would
regale them, as he had done throughout the war, for up to two
hours with banalities and monologues about the Church, race
problems, the classical world, or the German character. After
fondling Blondi and playing for a while with her puppy (which he
had named ‘Wolf’), he would at last allow his secretaries to retreat
and finally retire himself to bed. It was by then, as a rule, according
to Linge’s planned schedule, around five o’clock in the morning,
though in practice often much later.

A piece of pure escapism punctuated at this time Hitler’s daily
dose of gloom from the fronts: his visits to the model of his home-
town Linz, his intended place of retirement, as it was to have been
rebuilt at the end of the war, following a glorious German victory.
The model had been designed by his architect Hermann Giesler
(who had been commissioned by Hitler in autumn 1940 with the
rebuilding of Linz), and was set up in February 1945 in the spacious

cellar of the New Reich Chancellery. In January 1945, as the failure
of the Ardennes offensive became apparent, as the eastern front
caved in under the Red Army’s assault, and as bombs rained down
also on the Danube region in which Linz was situated, Giesler’s
office was repeatedly telephoned by Hitler’s adjutants, and by
Bormann. The Fuhrer kept speaking of the model of Linz, they told
Giesler; when would it be ready for him to inspect?

Giesler’s team worked through the nights to meet Hitler’s
request. When the model was finally ready for him to see, on 9
February, Hitler was entranced. Bent over the model, he viewed it
from all angles, and in different kinds of lighting. He asked for a
seat. He checked the proportions of the different buildings. He
asked about the details of the bridges. He studied the model for a
long time, apparently lost in thought. While Giesler stayed in
Berlin, Hitler accompanied him twice daily to view the model, in
the afternoon and again during the night. Others in his entourage
were taken down to have his building plans explained to them as
they pored over the model. Looking down on the model of a city
which, he knew, would never be built, Hitler could fall into reverie,
revisiting the fantasies of his youth, when he would dream with his
friend Kubizek about rebuilding Linz. They were distant days. It was
soon back to a far harsher reality.

He spoke with Goebbels early in February about the defence of
Berlin. They discussed the possible evacuation of some of the
government offices to Thuringia. Hitler told Goebbels, however,
that he was determined to stay in Berlin ‘and to defend the city’.
Hitler was still optimistic that the Oder front could be held.
Goebbels was more sceptical. Hitler and Goebbels spoke of the war
in the east as a historic struggle to save the ‘European cultural
world’ from latter-day Huns and Mongols. Those would fare best
who had burnt their boats and contemplated no compromises. ‘At
any rate we never entertain even a thought of capitulation,’ noted
Goebbels. Nevertheless, with Hitler still adamant that the coalition
against him would collapse within the year, Goebbels recommended
putting out feelers for an opening to the British. He did not

embroider upon how this might be achieved. Hitler, as always,
claimed the time was not conducive to such a move. Indeed, he
feared that the British might turn to more draconian war methods,
including the use of poison gas. In such an eventuality, he was
determined to have large numbers of the Anglo-American prisoners
in German hands shot.

On the evening of 12 February, ‘the Big Three’ — Roosevelt,
Stalin, and Churchill — put out a communiqué from Yalta on the
Crimea, where they had been conferring for a week, spending much
of the time on the post-war shape of Germany and Europe. The
communiqué left the Nazi leadership under no illusions about Allied
plans for Germany: the country would be divided and demilitarized,
its industry controlled, reparations paid; war criminals would be put
on trial; the Nazi Party would be abolished. ‘We know now where
we are,’ commented Goebbels. Hitler was immediately informed.
He seemed unimpressed. He needed no further confirmation of his
unchanging view that capitulation was pointless. The Allied leaders,
he commented, ‘want to separate the German people from its
leadership. I’ve always said: there’s no question of another
capitulation.’ After a brief pause, he added: ‘History does not repeat
itself.’

The following night, the city centre of Dresden was obliterated.
Hitler heard the news of the devastation stony-faced, fists clenched.
Goebbels, said to have been shaking with fury, immediately
demanded the execution of tens of thousands of Allied prisoners-of-
war, one for each citizen killed in air-raids. Hitler was taken with
the idea. Brutal German treatment of prisoners-of-war would, he
was certain, prompt retaliation by the Allies. That would deter
German soldiers on the western front from deserting. Guderian
recalled Hitler stating: ‘The soldiers on the eastern front fight far
better. The reason they give in so easily in the west is simply the
fault of that stupid Geneva convention which promises them good
treatment as prisoners. We must scrap this idiotic convention.’ It
took the efforts of Jodl, Keitel, Donitz, and Ribbentrop, viewing

such a reaction as counter-productive, to dissuade him from such a
drastic step.

A few days later, Hitler summoned the Gauleiter, his most trusted
party viceroys, to the Reich Chancellery for what would prove to be
a final meeting. The last time they had assembled had been in early
August of the previous year, shortly after Stauffenberg’s attempt on
Hitler’s life. The present occasion was the twenty-fifth anniversary
of the proclamation of the Party Programme in the Hofbrauhaus in
Munich on 24 February 1920.

Hitler had frequently addressed the Gauleiter at moments of crisis
during the past years. The real purpose of the present gathering was
to rally the core of his support as the regime faced its gravest crisis.
He had nothing resembling good news to impart. In the west, the
Allies were pressing towards the Rhine. In the east, the counter-
offensive launched a few days earlier in Pomerania offered no more
than a fleeting ray of light in the deep gloom. Himmler’s Army
Group Vistula was encountering that very day a renewed assault
from the Red Army. The absence of Erich Koch, whose East Prussian
Gau was almost completely cut off by the Red Army, and Karl
Hanke, besieged in Breslau, was a reminder of the fate of the
eastern provinces. And the cluster of Gauleiter pressing Martin
Mutschmann, Gauleiter of Saxony, for news about Dresden, or their
party comrades from the Rhineland about the failure of the
Ardennes offensive and the fighting in the west, told its own tale.

Hitler’s appearance, when he entered the hall at 2 p.m. that
afternoon, was a shock to many of the Gauleiter, who had not seen
him for six months or so. His physical condition had deteriorated
sharply even during the space of those six months. He was more
haggard, aged, and bent than ever, shuffling in an unsteady gait as
if dragging his legs. His left hand and arm trembled uncontrollably.
His face was drained of colour; his eyes bloodshot, with bags
underneath them; occasionally a drop of saliva trickled from the
corner of his mouth.

Bormann had warned the Gauleiter in advance not to raise any
criticism. There was, as ever, little likelihood of confrontation. But

the sympathy at Hitler’s outward appearance did deflect from the
initial critical mood. Perhaps playing on this, he gave up at one
point an attempt to raise a glass of water to his mouth in a
trembling hand, without spilling it, and made reference to his own
debilitation. He spoke sitting down at a small table for an hour and
a half, his notes spread out in front of him. He began, as so often,
with the ‘heroic’ party history. With present and future so bleak, he
had come more and more to take refuge in the ‘triumphs’ of the
past. He looked back now once more to the First World War, his
decision to enter politics, and the struggle of National Socialism in
the Weimar Republic. He lauded the new spirit created by the party
after 1933. But his audience did not want to hear of the distant past.
They were anxious to know how, if at all, he would overcome the
overwhelming crisis currently sweeping over them. As usual, he
dealt only in generalities. He spoke of the approaching decisive
hour of the war, which would determine the shape of the coming
century. He pointed as usual to the ‘new weapons’, which would
bring about the change in fortune, praising the jets and new U-
boats. His main aim was to fire up his sturdiest supporters for a
final effort, to stiffen their morale and enthuse them to fight to the
end so that they in turn would stir up the people in their region to
selfless sacrifice, indomitable defence, and refusal to capitulate. If
the German people should lose the war, he declared (in a further
demonstration of his unchanged social-Darwinism), then it would
indicate that it did not possess the ‘internal value’ that had been
attributed to it, and he would have no sympathy with this people.
He tried to persuade the Gauleiter that he alone could judge the
course of events correctly. But even in this circle, among the party
chieftains who for so many years had been the backbone of his
power, few could share his optimism. His ability to motivate his
closest supporters by the force of his rhetoric had dissolved.

This was even more the case for the mass of the population,
where the words of the greatest demagogue known to history had
by this time been drained of all impact, and were generally
regarded as little more than empty phrases, bearing the promise of

nothing other than further suffering until the war could be ended.
The anniversary of the promulgation of the Party Programme had,
until 1942, been traditionally the date of a big speech by Hitler in
the Festsaal of the Hofbrauhaus in Munich. In 1945, as in 1942 and
1943, Hitler confined himself to a proclamation. Read out by
Hermann Esser, one of his Munich cronies from the early days of
the party, the proclamation was to prove Hitler’s final public
statement to the German people.

It amounted to no more than yet a further repeat of the long
empty phrases of the old message. National Socialism alone had
given the people the toughness to combat the threat to its very
existence of an ‘unnatural alliance’, ‘a diabolical pact between
democratic capitalism and Jewish Bolshevism’. The atrocities of
Bolshevism — ‘this Jewish plague’ — were now being experienced
directly in the eastern parts of the Reich. Only ‘extreme fanaticism
and resolute steadfastness’ could ward off the peril of ‘this Jewish-
Bolshevik annihilation of peoples and its west European and
American pimps’. Weakness would and must perish. It was a ‘duty
to maintain the freedom of the German nation for the future’ and —
the unmistakable attempt to shore up fighting spirit through
instilling fear — ‘not to let German labour be shipped off to Siberia’.
Its fanatical hatred for ‘the destroyer of mankind’ bolstered by the
suffering it had endured, National Socialist Germany would continue
the fight until ‘the historical turning’ came about. It would be that
year. He ended on a note of pathos. His life had only the value it
possessed for the nation. He wanted to share the suffering of the
people, and almost regretted that the Berghof had not been
bombed, which would have enabled him to share the sense of loss
of possessions. (On this, the Allies were ready to oblige a few weeks
later.) ‘The life left to us,’ he declared at the close, ‘can serve only
one command, that is to make good what the international Jewish
criminals and their henchmen have done to our people.’

A poignant commentary was voiced in the routine report of the
SD station in Berchtesgaden, where once thousands of ‘pilgrims’ had
poured in to try to catch a glance of the Fithrer during his stays at

the Berghof. ‘Among the overwhelming majority of people’s
comrades,’ the report ran, ‘the content of the proclamation whistled
by like the wind in the empty boughs.’

It was presumably Hitler’s sensitivity to his public image that
made him refuse Goebbels’s request for a press report to shore up
morale. He must have been alert to the inevitable derision that
would be induced by reports of soldiers - many of them by now no
more than boys — cheering him on a brief visit he and a small
entourage had paid on 3 March to troops at Wriezen, some forty
miles north-east of Berlin, just behind the Oder front. The news
from the eastern front had left Hitler in a depressed mood, the
shaking left hand more noticeable than ever, when the Propaganda
Minister saw him the following evening. In Pomerania, Soviet tanks
had broken through and were now outside Kolberg, on the Baltic.
(When the town finally had to be evacuated later in the month,
Goebbels suppressed the news because of the blatantly
contradictory image of the nationalist epic colour-film he had had
made on the town’s stand against Napoleon, meant to stir modern-
day defiance against the Red Army.) Himmler, the commander of
Army Group Vistula, responsible for Pomerania’s defence, had taken
to his sick-bed — suffering, it seems, from nothing worse than a
heavy cold on top of overwrought nerves — and retreated to the
clinic at Hohenlychen, sixty or so miles north of Berlin, for
convalescence. Hitler, as always, blamed the General Staff for the
debacle. He was still hopeful of blocking the Red Army’s advance;
Goebbels had his doubts. Further south, the Czech industrial areas
were under dire threat. Without them, Goebbels could not see how
minimal armaments demands could any longer be met. Hitler hoped
they could hold out, there and in Silesia, and inflict serious reverses
on the Red Army with a counter-offensive — to prove the last of the
war — beginning on 6 March.

In the west, Hitler was still optimistic about holding the Rhine. In
reality, US troops were on the verge of entering Cologne, and only
days later would take the bridge at Remagen and secure a foothold
across the mighty artery. Goebbels, ready as so often to counter

Hitler’s instinctive optimism with cautious hints of realism, pointed
out that, should the western defences not hold, ‘our last political
war argument would collapse’, since the Anglo-Americans would be
able to penetrate to central Germany and would have no interest in
any negotiations. The growing crisis in the Alliance remained a
straw to clutch at. But Goebbels was aware that Germany might be
prostrate before it materialized.

Hitler still thought Stalin more likely than the western powers to
show interest in negotiations. Whereas Roosevelt and Churchill
would have difficulties with public opinion, Stalin could ignore it in
reversing his war-policy overnight. But, as always, Hitler
emphasized that the basis of any ‘special peace’ could only be
military success. Pushing the Soviets back and inflicting heavy
losses on them would make them more amenable. A new division of
Poland, the return of Hungary and Croatia to German sovereignty,
and operational freedom against the West would, Hitler hoped, be
the prize. Thereafter, his aim, according to Goebbels, was to
‘continue the struggle against England with the most brutal energy’.
Britain, he thought, turning on the country that had spurned his
earlier advances, was the ‘eternal trouble-causer in Europe’.
Sweeping it out of the Continent for good would bring Germany —
at least for a while — some peace. Goebbels reflected that the Soviet
atrocities were a handicap for Hitler’s way forward. But he noted
laconically that Europe had once survived the ravages of the
Mongols: ‘The storms from the east come and go, and Europe has to
cope with them.’

Goebbels remained the fervent devotee of Hitler that he had been
for twenty years. Though often frustrated and critical behind his
leader’s back at what he saw as undue reluctance to take measures
necessary to radicalize the home front, and weakness in personnel
matters — particularly the repeated unwillingness to dismiss Goring
and Ribbentrop (both of whom he saw as bearing undue
responsibility for Germany’s plight) - Goebbels never ceased to be
enthused once more by Hitler after spending time in his company.
For Goebbels, Hitler’s determination and optimism shone through

the ‘desolate mood’ of the Reich Chancellery. ‘If anyone can master
the crisis, then he can,’ the Propaganda Minister remarked. ‘No one
else can be found who is anywhere near touching him.’

But, though his personal subordination for the father-figure he
had for so long revered remained, even Goebbels was no longer
persuaded by Hitler’s apparent confidence in turning the tide. He
was anticipating the end, looking to the history books. Magda and
the children would join him and stay in Berlin, come what may, he
told Hitler. If the struggle could not be mastered, then at least it
had to be sustained with honour, he wrote. He was gripped by
Thomas’s Carlyle’s biography, glorifying the heroism of Frederick
the Great, and presented Hitler with a copy. He read out to him the
passages relating the King’s reward for his unbending resolution in
circumstances of mounting despair during the Seven Years War by
the sudden and dramatic upturn in his fortunes. Hitler’s eyes filled
with tears. Hitler, too, was looking to his place in history. ‘It must
be our ambition,’ he told Goebbels on 11 March, ‘Heroes’ Memorial
Day’, ‘also in our times to set an example for later generations to
look to in similar crises and pressures, just as we today have to look
to the past heroes of history.’ The theme ran through his
proclamation to the Wehrmacht that day. He declared it his
‘unalterable decision ... to provide the world to come with no worse
example than bygone times have left us’. The sentence that followed
encapsulated the essence of Hitler’s political ‘career’: ‘The year 1918
will therefore not repeat itself.’

To rule this out, no price — even self-destruction — was too high. In
his characteristic ‘either-or’ way of thinking, Hitler had invariably
posed total destruction as the alternative to the total victory for
which he had striven. Inwardly convinced that his enemies were
intent on bringing about that total destruction — the Morgenthau
Plan of 1944, envisaging the reduction of a defeated Germany to
the status of an agricultural country with a pre-industrial economy

had given sustenance to this belief - no measure was for him too
radical in the fight for survival. Consistent only with his own
warped and peculiar brand of logic, he was prepared to take
measures with such far-reaching consequences for the German
population that the very survival he claimed to be fighting for was
fundamentally threatened. Ultimately, the continued existence of
the German people — if it showed itself incapable of defeating its
enemies — was less important to him than the refusal to capitulate.

Few, even of his closest acolytes, were ready to follow this self-
destructive urge to the letter. Albert Speer was one of those looking
to the future after a lost war. Perhaps the ambitious Speer was still
hoping to have some part to play in a Germany without Hitler. At
any rate, he knew the war was irredeemably lost. And he was
looking to save what could be saved of the economic substance of
the country. He had no interest ina Germany going down ina
maelstrom of destruction to satisfy the irrational and pointless
principle of ‘heroic’ self-sacrifice rather than capitulation. He knew
only too well that the preservation of Germany’s material substance
for a post-Hitler future had long been the aim of the leading
industrialists with whom he had worked so closely. He had hindered
the implementation of Hitler’s orders for the destruction of French
industry. And in recent weeks, he had arranged with Colonel-
General Heinrici in Upper Silesia, Field-Marshal Model in the Ruhr
(now on the verge of being taken by the western Allies), and
Colonel-General Guderian for the entire eastern front that factories,
mines, railways, roads, bridges, waterworks, gasworks, power-
stations, and other installations vital to the German economy should
be spared destruction wherever possible.

On 18 March, Speer passed to Below a memorandum he had
drafted three days earlier. Below was to choose a favourable
moment to hand it to Hitler. The memorandum stated plainly that
the final collapse of the German economy would occur within four
to eight weeks, after which the war could not be continued. The
prime duty of those leading the country must be to do what they
could for the civilian population. But detonating bridges, with the

consequent major destruction of the transport infrastructure, would
signify ‘the elimination of all further possibility of existence for the
German people’. Speer concluded: ‘We have no right, at this stage of
the war, to undertake destruction which could affect the existence
of the people ... We have the duty of leaving the people every
possibility of establishing a reconstruction in the distant future.’

A strong hint of Hitler’s likely response could be gleaned at the
military briefing that evening, when the topic arose of evacuation
of the local population from the combat zone in the Saar. Despite an
almost total lack of transport, Hitler’s express order was that the
complete evacuation should be undertaken forthwith. Consideration
could not be given to the population. A few hours after the briefing
ended, just before Speer left for a tour of the threatened areas on
the western front, Hitler summoned him. According to Speer’s
recollection, noted down ten days later, Hitler told him coldly that
should the war be lost, the people would also be lost, and that there
was no need to take consideration even of its most primitive
survival. The German people had proved the weaker in the struggle.
Only those who were inferior would remain.

Hitler had promised Speer a written reply to his memorandum. It
was not long in coming, and was predictably the opposite of what
Speer had recommended. Whatever the cost, in Hitler’s view, intact
vital installations for industrial production could not be allowed to
fall into enemy hands as had happened in Upper Silesia and the
Saar. His decree of 19 March, headed ‘Destructive Measures on
Reich Territory’, was consistent with a philosophy by now wholly at
odds with Speer’s. ‘The struggle for the existence of our people,’ his
decree ran, ‘compels the use of all means, also within the territory
of the Reich, to weaken the fighting power of our enemy and its
further advance. All possibilities of imparting directly or indirectly
lasting damage to the striking power of the enemy must be
exploited. It is an error to believe that undestroyed or only
temporarily disabled transport, communications, industrial, and
supplies installations can again be made operational for our own
purposes at the recapture of lost territories. The enemy will leave us

only scorched earth at its retreat and drop any consideration for the
population. I therefore order: 1) All military transport,
communications, industrial, and supplies installations as well as
material assets within Reich territory, which the enemy can render
usable immediately or within the foreseeable future are to be
destroyed. 2) Those responsible for the implementation of this
destruction are: military command authorities for all military
objects, including transport and communications installations, the
Gauleiter and Reich Defence Commissars for all industrial and
supplies installations and other material assets. The troops are to
provide the necessary aid to the Gauleiter and Reich Defence
Commissars in the implementation of their task ...’

The decree was never put into practice. Though, initially, several
Gauleiter — prominent among them Gauleiter Friedrich Karl Florian
in Dusseldorf — were eager to carry out Hitler’s orders to the letter,
Speer was eventually successful in persuading them of the futility of
the intended action. In any case, the Gauleiter agreed that it was in
practice impossible to implement the order. Model was one of the
front-line military commanders also prepared to cooperate with
Speer in keeping destruction of industrial plant to a minimum. By
the end of March, with difficulty, Speer had managed to convince
Hitler —- aware though he was of the Armaments Minister’s effective
sabotage of his order — that he should be granted overall
responsibility for implementing all measures for destruction. This
took the key decisions out of the hands of the Gauleiter, Hitler’s key
representatives in the regions. It meant, as Hitler knew, that
everything possible would be done to avoid the destruction he had
ordered.

The non-implementation of the ‘scorched earth’ order was the
first obvious sign that Hitler’s authority was beginning to wane, his
writ ceasing to run. ‘We’re giving out orders in Berlin that in
practice no longer arrive lower down, let alone can be
implemented,’ remarked Goebbels at the end of March. ‘I see in that
the danger of an extraordinary dwindling of authority.’

Hitler continued to see himself as indispensable. ‘If anything
happens to me, Germany is lost, since I have no successor,’ he told
his secretaries. ‘Hef§ has gone mad, Goring has squandered the
sympathies of the German people, and Himmler is rejected by the
party,’ was his assessment.

Hitler had been absolutely dismissive of Goring’s leadership
qualities in ‘turbulent times’ in speaking to Goebbels in mid-
February 1945. As ‘leader of the nation’, he was ‘utterly
unimaginable’. Tirades about the Reich Marshal were commonplace.
On one occasion, fists clenched, face flushed with anger, he
humiliated Goring in front of all present at a military briefing,
threatening to reduce him to the ranks and dissolve the Luftwaffe as
a separate branch of the armed forces. Goring could only withdraw
to the ante-room and swallow a few glasses of brandy. But despite
regular exposure to Goebbels’s vitriol about the Reich Marshal and
impassioned entreaties to dismiss him, Hitler persisted in his view
that he had no suitable replacement.

Hitler’s attitude towards Himmler had also hardened. His blind
fury at the retreat of divisions — including that specially named after
him, the Leibstandarte-SS Adolf Hitler — of Sepp Dietrich’s 6th
Panzer Army in the face of heavy losses and imminent encirclement
in bitter fighting on the Danube was directed at Himmler. The
Reichsfithrer-SS was in despair at the breach with Hitler, symbolized
in the order he was forced to carry to Dietrich commanding his four
Waffen-SS divisions, among them the élite Leibstandarte Adolf
Hitler, to remove their armlets in disgrace. With Hitler now feeling
betrayed even by his own SS commanders, Himmler’s waning star
sank steeply through his own evident failings as Commander of
Army Group Vistula. Hitler held the Reichsfithrer-SS personally
responsible for the failure to block the Soviet advance through
Pomerania. He accused him of having immediately fallen under the
influence of the General Staff — a heinous offence in Hitler’s eyes —
and even of direct disobedience of his orders to build up anti-tank
defences in Pomerania. Blaming others as usual, he took the view
that Pomerania could have been held if Himmler had followed his

orders. He intended, he told Goebbels, to make plain to him at their
next meeting that any repetition would lead to an irreparable
breach. Whether the rift was further deepened through rumours
abroad — in fact, close to the truth - linking Himmler’s name with
peace soundings is unclear. But there was no doubt that Himmler’s
standing with Hitler had slumped dramatically. The Reichsfithrer-SS
remained, for his part, both dismayed at the rupture in relations,
and cautious in the extreme, aware that even now his authority
hinged solely on Hitler’s continued favour. But after being relieved
of his command of Army Group Vistula on 20 March, Himmler
increasingly went his own way.

The circle of those Hitler trusted was diminishing sharply. At the
same time, his intolerance of any contradiction of his views had
become as good as absolute. The one remaining voice among his
generals which had been increasingly outspoken in its criticism was
that of Colonel-General Guderian. Where Keitel spoke with so little
authority that younger officers scornfully dubbed him the ‘Reich
Garage Attendant’, and Jodl carefully attuned his briefings to
Hitler’s moods and anticipated his wishes, Guderian was terse,
pointed, and frank in his remarks. The conflicts, which had mounted
since Christmas in their intensity, were ended abruptly at the end of
March with Guderian’s dismissal. By that time, the final German
offensive near Lake Balaton in Hungary, started on 6 March, had
failed and the Soviets were marching on the last remaining oil
reserves open to Germany; the Red Army had meanwhile cut off
Konigsberg in East Prussia, broken through at Oppeln in Upper
Silesia, taken Kolberg on the Baltic coast, opened up German
defences close to Danzig, and surrounded the SS battalions fiercely
defending the strategically important stronghold of Ktistrin on the
Oder. In the west, outside Guderian’s sphere of responsibility, the
news was at least as sombre. General Patton’s 3rd US Army had
taken Darmstadt and reached the river Main; and American tanks
had entered the outskirts of Frankfurt. Hitler had not expected the
western front to collapse so rapidly. As always, he smelled betrayal.

And, characteristically, he was now ready to make Guderian the
scapegoat for the dire situation on the eastern front.

Guderian had been expecting a stormy meeting when he arrived
at Hitler’s bunker on 28 March for the afternoon briefing. He was
determined to continue his defence of General Theodor Busse
against the accusation that he held responsibility for the failure of
his 9th Army to relieve the encircled troops at Ktstrin. But Hitler
was not prepared to listen. He peremptorily adjourned the meeting,
keeping only Keitel and Guderian back. Without demur, the Chief of
Staff was told that his health problems demanded he take with
immediate effect six weeks’ convalescent leave. He was replaced by
the more compliant General Hans Krebs.

Reports were by now coming in from Kesselring’s headquarters
that the western front in the region of Hanau and Frankfurt am
Main was showing serious signs of disintegration. White flags were
being hoisted; women were embracing American soldiers as they
entered; troops, not wanting to fight any longer, were fleeing from
any prospect of battle or simply surrendering. Kesselring wanted
Hitler to speak without delay to shore up the wavering will to fight.
Goebbels agreed. Churchill and Stalin had both spoken to their
nations at times of utmost peril. Germany’s position was even
worse. ‘In such a serious situation, the nation cannot remain without
an appeal from the highest authority,’ Goebbels noted. He
telephoned General Burgdorf, Hitler’s chief Wehrmacht adjutant,
and impressed upon him the need to persuade Hitler to speak to the
German people. Next day, walking for an hour among the ruins of
the Reich Chancellery garden alongside the bent figure of Hitler,
Goebbels tried to exert all his own influence in pleading with him to
give a ten- or fifteen-minute radio address. Hitler did not want to
speak, however, ‘because at present he has nothing positive to
offer’. Goebbels did not give up. Hitler finally agreed. But
Goebbels’s evident scepticism proved justified. A few days later,
Hitler again promised to give his speech — but only after he had
gained a success in the west. He knew he should speak to the
people. But the SD had informed him that his previous speech — his

proclamation on 24 February — had been criticized for not saying
anything new. And Goebbels acknowledged that, indeed, he had
nothing new to offer the people. The Propaganda Minister repeated
his hope that Hitler would nevertheless speak to them. ‘The people
were waiting for at least a slogan,’ he urged. But Hitler had by now
even run out of propaganda slogans for the people of Germany.

Goebbels remained puzzled — and, behind his admiration, irritated
and frustrated — at Hitler’s reluctance to take what the Propaganda
Minister regarded as vital, radical steps even at this later hour to
change Germany’s fortunes. In this, he privately reflected, Frederick
the Great had been far more ruthless. Hitler, by contrast, accepted
the diagnosis of the problem. But no action followed. He took the
setbacks and grave dangers, thought Goebbels, too lightly — at least,
he pointedly added, in his presence; ‘privately, he will certainly
think differently.’ He was still confident of the split among the
Allies he had so long been predicting. ‘But it pains me,’ Goebbels
noted, ‘that he is at present not to be moved to do anything to
deepen the political crisis in the enemy camp. He doesn’t change
personnel, either in the Reich government or in the diplomatic
service. Goring stays. Ribbentrop stays. All failures — apart from the
second rank — are retained, and it would in my view be so necessary
to undertake here in particular a change of personnel because this
would be of such decisive importance for the morale of our people.
I press and press; but I can’t convince the Fuhrer of the necessity of
these measures that I put forward.’ It was, Goebbels pointed out, ‘as
if he lived in the clouds’.

Not only Hitler held on to a make-believe world. ‘One day, the
Reich of our dreams will emerge,’ wrote Gerda Bormann to her
husband. ‘Shall we, I wonder, or our children, live to see it?’ ‘I have
every hope that we shall!’ jotted Martin, between the lines. ‘In some
ways, you know, this reminds me of the “Twilight of the Gods” in
the Edda,’ Gerda’s letter continued. ‘The monsters are storming the
bridge of the Gods ... the citadel of the Gods crumbles, and all
seems lost; and then, suddenly a new citadel rises, more beautiful
than ever before ... We are not the first to engage in mortal combat

with the powers of the underworld, and that we feel impelled, and
are also able, to do so should give us a conviction of ultimate
victory.’

An air of unreality also pervaded, in part, the administrative
machines of party and state. Though, certainly, the state
bureaucracy — now mostly removed from Berlin — was confronted
with the actualities of a lost war in trying to cope with the acute
problems of refugees from the east, housing the homeless from
bomb-damaged cities, and ensuring that public facilities were kept
running, much of what remained of civil administration — massively
hampered through repeated breakdowns in postal and rail
communications — had little to do with the everyday needs of the
population. The sober-minded and long-serving Finance Minister,
Lutz Graf Schwerin von Krosigk, for instance, completed at the end
of March his plans for tax reform — criticized by Goebbels (as if they
were about to be implemented) for their ‘unsocial’ emphasis on
consumer tax, which would affect the mass of the population, rather
than income tax. That much of the country was by this time under
enemy occupation seemed irrelevant.

Meanwhile, Martin Bormann was still working feverishly on
restructuring the party to control the new, peacetime Germany that
would emerge from the war. And as the Reich shrank, lines of
communication disintegrated, and directives became increasingly
overtaken by events, he sent more circulars, decrees, and
promulgations than ever — over 400 in the last four months of the
war — cascading down to lower functionaries of the party. ‘Again a
mass of new decrees and orders pour in from Bormann,’ noted
Goebbels on 4 April. ‘Bormann has made a paper chancellery out of
the Party Chancellery. Every day he sends out a mountain of letters
and files which Gauleiter at present in the midst of the struggle can
in practice not even read. In part, it’s a matter of completely useless
stuff of no value for the practical struggle.’ A party bureaucracy in
overdrive poured out regulations on provision of bread grain, small-
arms training of women and girls, repair of railways and road

communications, eking out additional food from wild vegetables,
fruit, and mushrooms, and a host of other issues.

Alongside such miscellanea went the constant demands and
exhortations to hold out, whatever the cost. Bormann informed
party functionaries on 1 April that summary and draconian
punishment for desertion awaited ‘any scoundrel ... who does not
fight to the last breath’. He detailed functionaries to work with
Wehrmacht units in stiffening morale in areas close to the front and
to set up quasi-guerrilla organizations such as the ‘Freikorps Adolf
Hitler’ (drawn from the party’s functionaries) and the ‘Werwolf ’ (to
be made up largely of Hitler Youth members) to carry on the fight
through partisan activity in the occupied areas of the Reich. German
propaganda sought to convey the impression to the Allies that they
were endangered by an extensively organized underground
resistance-movement. In practice, the ‘Werwolf ’was of scant
military significance, and was mainly a threat, in its arbitrary and
vicious retribution, to German citizens revealing any traces of
‘defeatism’.

On 15 April Bormann put out a circular to Political Leaders of the
Party: ‘The Fuhrer expects that you will master every situation in
your Gaue, if necessary with lightning speed and extreme brutality
.... Like more and more of his missives, it existed largely on paper.
Correspondence to reality was minimal. It was a classic illustration
of the continuing illusory and despairing belief in the triumph of
will alone. But even the unconstrained and arbitrary violence of a
regime patently in its death-throes could not contain the open
manifestations of disintegration. Ever fewer brown party uniforms
were to be seen on the streets. And ever more party functionaries
were disappearing into the ether as the enemy approached, looking
more to self-preservation than to heroic last stands. ‘The behaviour
of our Gau and District Leaders in the west has led to a strong drop
in confidence among the population,’ commented Goebbels. ‘As a
consequence, the Party is fairly played out in the west.’

During early April, the last German troops pulled out of Hungary.
Bratislava fell to the Red Army as it advanced on Vienna. To the

north, the German troops cut off in Konigsberg surrendered the city
on 9 April. In the west, Allied troops pushed through Westphalia,
taking Miinster and Hamm. By 10 April, Essen and Hanover were in
American hands. The vice was tightening on the Ruhr, Germany’s
battered industrial heartland. A sudden shaft of optimism penetrated
the dense gloom enveloping Hitler’s bunker: the news came through
of the death on 12 April, at his winter retreat in Warm Springs,
Georgia, of one of his greatest adversaries, and linchpin in the
unholy coalition of forces against him, President Roosevelt.

Goebbels rang up, elated, to congratulate Hitler. Two weeks
earlier, the Propaganda Minister had been given a file of
astrological material, including a horoscope of the Fiihrer. It
prophesied an improvement in Germany’s military position in the
second half of April. Goebbels’s sole interest in the material, he
said, was for propaganda purposes, to give people something to
cling on to. It served this purpose now, for the moment, for Hitler.
‘Here, read this!’ Hitler, looking revitalized and in an excited voice,
instructed Speer. ‘Here! You never wanted to believe it. Here! ...
Here we have the great miracle that I always foretold. Who’s right
now? The war is not lost. Read it! Roosevelt is dead!’ It seemed to
him like the hand of Providence yet again. Goebbels, fresh from his
reading of Carlyle’s biography of Frederick the Great, reminded
Hitler of the death of the Czarina Elisabeth that had brought a
sudden change of fortune for the Prussian King in the Seven Years
War. The artificial coalition enemies aligned against Germany
would now break up. History was repeating itself. Whether Hitler
was as convinced as he seemed that the hand of Providence had
produced the turning-point of the war is uncertain. One close to him
in these days, his Luftwaffe adjutant Nicolaus von Below, thought
him more sober at the news than Goebbels — whose cynical eye was,
as always, directed at the possible propaganda advantages.

Even for those who saw him at close quarters, it was difficult to
be sure of Hitler’s true feelings about the war. Field-Marshal
Kesselring, who saw Hitler for the last time on 12 April, the day of
Roosevelt’s death, later recalled: ‘He was still optimistic. How far

he was play-acting it is hard to decide. Looking back, I am inclined
to think that he was literally obsessed with the idea of some
miraculous salvation, that he clung to it like a drowning man to a
straw.’

Whether genuine or contrived, Hitler’s jubilation did not last
long. On 13 April, the news was given to him that Vienna had been
taken by the Red Army. The following day, American attacks
succeeded in splitting German forces defending the Ruhr. Within
three days, the fighting in the Ruhr was over. Field-Marshal Model,
a long-standing favourite of Hitler, dissolved his encircled Army
Group B rather than offer formal capitulation. It made no difference.
Around 325,000 German troops and thirty generals gave themselves
up to the Americans on 17 April. Model committed suicide four days
later in a wooded area south of Duisburg.

On 15 April, in anticipation of a new Soviet offensive — which he
thought, probably taken in by Stalin’s disinformation directed at the
western Allies, would first sweep through Saxony to Prague to head
off the Americans before tackling Berlin — Hitler had issued a ‘basic
order’ for the eventuality that the Reich might be split in two. He
set up a supreme commander - in effect his military representative
— to take full responsibility for the defence of the Reich, should
communications be broken, in whichever part he himself was not
situated. Grand-Admiral Donitz was designated for the northern
zone, Field-Marshal Kesselring for the south. The implication was
that Hitler was keeping the option open of carrying on the fight
from the south, in the fastness of the Bavarian Alps.

On the same day, Hitler issued what would turn out to be his last
proclamation to the soldiers on the eastern front. It played heavily
on the stories of Soviet atrocities. ‘For the last time, the Jewish-
Bolshevik mortal enemy has set out with its masses on the attack,’ it
began. ‘He is attempting to demolish Germany and to exterminate
our people. You soldiers from the East know yourselves in large
measure what fate threatens above all German women, girls, and
children. While old men and children are murdered, women and
girls are denigrated to barrack-whores. The rest are marched off to

Siberia.’ It went on to alert the troops to the slightest sign of
treachery, particularly — the long-standing exaggeration of the
influence of the National Committee for a Free Germany,
established in Moscow by captured German officers — troops
fighting against them in German uniforms receiving Russian pay.
Anyone not known to them ordering a retreat was to be captured
and ‘if need be immediately dispatched, irrespective of rank’. The
proclamation had its climax in the slogan: ‘Berlin stays German,
Vienna will be German again, and Europe will never be Russian.’

It was to no avail. In the early hours of 16 April, a huge artillery
barrage announced the launch of the awaited assault from the line
of the Oder and Neisse rivers by over a million Soviet troops under
Marshal Zhukov and Marshal Konev. The German defenders from
the 9th Army and, to its south, the 4th Panzer Army fought
tenaciously. The Soviets suffered some significant losses. For a few
hours, the front held. But the odds were hopeless. During the
afternoon, after renewed heavy artillery bombardment, the German
line was broken north of Kustrin on the west bank of the Oder. The
gap between the 9th Army and the 4th Panzer Army quickly
widened. Soviet infantry poured through, rapidly followed by
hundreds of tanks, and over the next two days extended and
consolidated their hold in the area south of Frankfurt an der Oder.
From then on the Oder front caved in completely. There could now
be only one outcome. The Red Army drove on over and past the
lingering defences. Berlin was directly in its sights.

General Busse’s 9th Army was pushed back towards the south of
the city. Hitler had ordered Busse to hold a line which his Army
Group Commander, Colonel-General Heinrici, had thought exposed
the 9th Army to encirclement. Ignoring Hitler’s orders, Heinrici
nevertheless commanded withdrawal westwards. By that time, only
parts of Busse’s army could evade imminent encirclement.
Meanwhile, the German General Staff was forced to flee from its
headquarters in secure bunkers at Zossen to the Wannsee - its
column of retreating vehicles mistaken by German planes for part of
a Soviet unit and attacked from the air as they went. To the north,

the forces under Colonel-General Heinrici and SS-
Obergruppenfihrer Felix Steiner were the last barrier to the ever
more menacing prospect of encirclement of the city as the Red
Army pushed through Eberswalde to Oranienburg. By 20 April,
Soviet tanks had reached the outskirts of the capital. That
afternoon, Berlin was under fire.

The rumble of artillery fire could be plainly heard from the Reich
Chancellery. There, with the Red Army on the doorstep, and to the
accompaniment of almost non-stop bombing by Allied planes,
leading Nazis gathered for what they knew would be the last time —
to celebrate Hitler’s fifty-sixth birthday, and, in most cases, to say
their farewells. It was the start of the last rites for the Third Reich.

28
Extinction

The atmosphere in the bunker on 20 April 1945, Hitler’s fifty-sixth
birthday, was more funereal than celebratory. There was no trace of
the pomp and circumstance of earlier years. The gaunt ruins of the
Reich Chancellery were themselves a stark reminder, if one was
needed, that there was no cause for celebration. Hitler felt this
himself. His birthday with the Russians at the gates of Berlin was —
everything points to this - an embarrassment to him, and for all
those who were obliged to offer him their birthday greetings.

Traditionally, Hitler’s personal staff gathered to be the first to
offer their congratulations on the stroke of midnight. This year,
Hitler, in depressed mood, had already told his valet, Heinz Linge,
that he did not want to receive his household; there were no
grounds for congratulation. Linge was ordered to pass on the
message. Predictably, this Fuhrer order was ignored. Waiting in the
ante-room, as midnight approached, to offer their formal
congratulations were Chief Wehrmacht Adjutant General Wilhelm
Burgdorf, Himmler’s liaison SS-Gruppenftthrer Hermann Fegelein
(who had recently married Eva Braun’s sister, Gretl), the long-
serving factotum Julius Schaub, a member of the ‘household’ since
the mid-1920s, Hitler’s adjutants NSKK-Oberfthrer Alwin-Broder
Albrecht and SS-Sturmbannftihrer Otto Gtinsche, Ribbentrop’s liaison
Walther Hewel, and press officer Heinz Lorenz. Hitler, tired and
dejected, said Linge should inform them that he had no time to
receive them. Only following Fegelein’s intercession with his sister-
in-law Eva Braun (who had returned to the Reich Chancellery some
weeks earlier, announcing she was staying with Hitler, and resisting

all attempts to persuade her to leave) did he concede, trudging
down the assembled line of his staff to receive their murmured
birthday greetings with a limp handshake and a vacant expression.
Further muted, almost embarrassed, congratulations followed from
the military leaders attending the first briefing of the day.
Afterwards, Hitler drank tea in his study with Eva Braun. It was
approaching nine o’clock in the morning before he finally went to
bed, only to be disturbed almost immediately by General Burgdorf
with the news of a Soviet breakthrough and advance towards
Cottbus, some sixty miles south-east of Berlin, on the southern part
of the front. Hitler took the news standing in his nightshirt at the
door of his bedroom, and told Linge he had not slept up to then and
to waken him an hour later than normal, at 2 p.m.

After breakfasting, playing with his alsatian puppy for a while,
and having Linge administer his cocaine eye-drops, he slowly
climbed the steps into the Reich Chancellery park. Waiting with
raised arms in the Nazi salute were delegations from the Courland
army, from SS units in Berlin, and twenty boys from the Hitler
Youth who had distinguished themselves in combat. Was this what
Berlin’s defence relied upon? one of Hitler’s secretaries wondered.
Hitler muttered a few words to them, patted one or two on the
cheek, and within minutes left them to carry on the fight against
Russian tanks.

Bormann, Himmler, Goebbels, Reich Youth Leader Artur Axmann,
and Dr Morell were among those in a further line waiting to be
received at the door of the Chancellery’s Winter Garden. Looking
drained and listless, his face ashen, his stoop pronounced, Hitler
went through the motions of a brief address. Not surprisingly, he
was by now incapable of raising spirits. Lunch with Christa
Schroeder and senior secretary Johanna Wolf was a depressing
affair. Afterwards, he retraced his steps down into the bowels of the
earth for the late afternoon briefing. He would not leave the bunker
again alive.

By now, most of the leading figures in the Reich — at least, those
in the Berlin vicinity - were assembled. Goring, Donitz, Keitel,

Ribbentrop, Speer, Jodl, Himmler, Kaltenbrunner, the new Chief of
Staff General Hans Krebs, and others all presented their greetings.
No one spoke of the looming catastrophe. They all swore their
undying loyalty. Everyone noticed that Goring had discarded his
resplendent silver-grey uniform with gold-braided epaulettes for
khaki - ‘like an American general’, as one participant at the briefing
remarked. Hitler passed no comment.

The imminent assault on Berlin dominated the briefing. The news
from the southern rim of the city was catastrophic. Goring pointed
out that only a single road to the south, through the Bayerischer
Wald, was still open; it could be blocked at any moment. His chief
of staff, General Karl Koller, added that any later attempt to
transfer the High Command of the Wehrmacht by air to new
headquarters could be ruled out. Hitler was pressed from all sides to
leave at once for Berchtesgaden. He objected that he could not
expect his troops to fight the decisive battle for Berlin if he
removed himself to safety. Keitel had told Koller before the briefing
that Hitler was determined to stay in Berlin. When greeting Hitler,
Keitel had murmured words of confidence that he would take
urgent decisions before the Reich capital became a battleground. It
was a strong hint that Hitler and his entourage should leave for the
south while there was still time. Hitler interrupted, saying: ‘Keitel, I
know what I want. I will fight on in front of, within, or behind
Berlin.’ Nevertheless, Hitler now seemed indecisive. Increasingly
agitated, he declared moments later that he would leave it to fate
whether he died in the capital or flew at the last moment to the
Obersalzberg.

There was no indecision about Goring. He had sent his wife
Emmy and daughter Edda to the safety of the Bavarian mountains
more than two months earlier. He had written his will in February.
Crate-loads of his looted art treasures from Carinhall, his palatial
country residence in the Schorfheide, forty miles north of Berlin,
had been shipped south in March. Half a million marks were
transferred to his account in Berchtesgaden. By the time he arrived
at the Reich Chancellery to pass on his birthday wishes to Hitler,

Carinhall was mined with explosives; his own remaining belongings
were packed and loaded on to lorries, ready to go on to the
Obersalzberg. Goring lost no time at the end of the briefing session
in seeking out a private word with Hitler. It was urgent, said the
Reich Marshal, that he go to southern Germany to command the
Luftwaffe from there. He needed to leave Berlin that very night.
Hitler scarcely seemed to notice. He muttered a few words, shook
hands absent-mindedly, and the first paladin of the Reich departed,
hurriedly and without fanfare. It seemed to Albert Speer, standing a
few feet away, to be a parting of ways that symbolized the
imminent end of the Third Reich.

It was the first of numerous departures. Most of those who had
come to proffer their birthday greetings to Hitler and make avowals
of their undying loyalty were waiting nervously for the moment
when they could hasten from the doomed city. Convoys of cars
were soon heading out of Berlin north, south, and west, on any
roads still open. Donitz left for the north, armed with Hitler’s
instructions — the implementation of the directive five days earlier
on division of command should the Reich be geographically split —
to take over the leadership in the north and continue the struggle. It
was a sign of Donitz’s high standing with Hitler on account of his
uncompromising support for the stance of fighting to the last, and
of hopes for a continuation of the U-boat war, that he was given
plenipotentiary powers to issue all relevant orders to state and
party, as well as to the Wehrmacht in the northern zone. Himmler,
Kaltenbrunner, and Ribbentrop soon followed. Speer left later that
night in the direction of Hamburg, without any formal farewell.

Hitler, according to Julius Schaub’s post-war testimony, was
deeply disappointed at the desire of his paladins to leave the bunker
in barely concealed haste. He gave no more than a perfunctory nod
of valediction to those who, now that his power was as good as
ended, were anxious to save what they could of themselves and
their possessions. By this time, most of the army top-brass had left.
And Bormann had already told the remaining government ministers
— Finance Minister Lutz Graf Schwerin-Krosigk, Transport Minister

Julius Dorpmiller, Justice Minister Otto Georg Thierack, Minister
for the Occupied Eastern Territories (a long redundant post) Alfred
Rosenberg, Education Minister Bernhard Rust, and Labour Minister
Franz Seldte — together with head of the Presidential Chancellery,
the old survivor, Otto Meissner, to make hasty preparations to leave
for the south, since the road would soon be blocked. Hitler’s naval
adjutant, Admiral Karl-Jesko von Puttkamer, was dispatched to the
Obersalzberg to destroy important papers there. His two older
secretaries, Johanna Wolf and Christa Schroeder, were summoned
to his study that evening and told to be ready to leave for the
Berghof within the hour. Four days earlier, he had told them in
confident tones: ‘Berlin will stay German. We must just gain time.’
Now, he said, the situation had changed so much in the past four
days, that he had to break up his staff.

The scene in the courtyard of the Reich Chancellery was near-
chaotic as vehicles were stuffed with bags and suitcases, the rumble
of artillery a reminder of how close the Red Army was as the cars
hurried through the night, through clouds of smoke billowing from
burning buildings, past shadowy ruins and Volkssturm men setting
up street barricades, to waiting aeroplanes. During the following
three nights, some twenty flights were made from Gatow and
Staaken aerodromes in Berlin, taking most of Hitler’s staff to
Berchtesgaden.

Late in the evening, the remaining adjutants, secretaries, and his
young Austrian diet cook, Constanze Manziarly, gathered in his
room for a drink with Hitler and Eva Braun. There was no talk here
of the war. Hitler’s youngest secretary, Traudl Junge, had been
shocked to hear him admit for the first time in her presence earlier
that day that he no longer believed in victory. He might be ready to
go under; her own life, she felt, had barely begun. Once Hitler —
early for him — had retired to his room, she was glad to join Eva
Braun, and other bunker ‘inmates’, even including Bormann and
Morell, in an ‘unofficial’ party in the old living room on the first
floor of Hitler’s apartment in the Reich Chancellery. In the ghostly
surrounds of a room stripped of almost all its former splendour,

with the gramophone scratching out the only record they could find
—asmaltzy pre-war hit called ‘Red Roses Bring You Happiness’ —
they laughed, danced, and drank champagne, trying to enjoy an
hour or two of escapism, before a nearby explosion sharply jolted
them back to reality.

When Hitler was awakened at 9.30 next morning, it was to the
news that the centre of Berlin was under artillery fire. He was at
first incredulous, immediately demanding information from Karl
Koller, Luftwaffe chief of staff, on the position of the Soviet artillery
battery. An observation post at Berlin’s zoo provided the answer:
the battery was no more than eight miles away in the suburb of
Marzahn. The dragnet was closing fast. The information scarcely
helped to calm Hitler’s increasingly volatile moods. As the day wore
on, he seemed increasingly like a man at the end of his tether,
nerves ragged, under intense strain, close to breaking point.
Irrational reactions when a frenzy of almost hysterically barked-out
orders proved impossible to implement, or demands for information
impossible to supply, point in this direction.

Soon he was on the telephone again to Koller, this time
demanding figures of German planes in action in the south of city.
Communications failures meant Koller was unable to provide them.
Hitler rang once more, this time wanting to know why the jets
based near Prague had not been operational the previous day.
Koller explained that enemy fighters had attacked the airfields so
persistently that the jets had been unable to take off. ‘Then we don’t
need the jets any more. The Luftwaffe is superfluous,’ Hitler had
replied in fury. ‘The entire Luftwaffe leadership should be hanged
straight away!’

The drowning man clutched at yet another straw. The Soviets had
extended their lines so far to the north-east of Berlin that it opened
up the chance, thought Hitler and Chief of Staff Krebs, for the
Panzer Corps led by SS-Obergruppenfiihrer Felix Steiner to launch a

counter-attack with good chances of success. A flurry of telephone
calls with more than a hint of near-hysteria assigned a motley
variety of remaining units, including naval and Luftwaffe forces
untrained in ground warfare and without heavy armour, to Steiner’s
command. ‘Every commander withholding forces has forfeited his
life within five hours,’ Hitler screamed at Koller. ‘The commanders
must know that. You yourself guarantee with your head that the
last man is deployed.’ Any retreat to the west was strictly forbidden
to Steiner’s forces. Officers unwilling to obey were to be shot
immediately. ‘On the success of your assignment depends the fate of
the German capital,’ Hitler told Steiner — adding that the
commander’s life also hinged on the execution of the order. At the
same time, Busse’s 9th Army, to the south of Berlin, was ordered to
restabilize and reinforce the defensive line from
Konigswusterhausen to Cottbus. In addition, aided by a northward
push of parts of Schorner’s Army Group Centre, still doggedly
fighting in the vicinity of Elsterwerda, around sixty miles south of
Berlin, it was to attack and cut off Konev’s tank forces that had
broken through to their rear. It was an illusory hope. But Hitler’s
false optimism was still being pandered to by some of the generals.
His mood visibly brightened after hearing upbeat reports from his
most recent field-marshal, Schorner (who had been promoted on 5
April), and from General Wenck about the chances of his newly
constructed 12th Army attacking American forces on the Elbe.

Colonel-General Heinrici, Commander of Army Group Vistula,
was not one of the eternal optimists who played to Hitler’s constant
need for good news. He warned of encirclement if the 9th Army
were not pulled back. He threatened resignation if Hitler persisted
in his orders. But Hitler did persist; and Heinrici did not resign. The
general had implied to Speer days earlier that Berlin would be taken
without serious resistance. This thinking was anathema to Hitler. He
told Jodl on the day his orders to Steiner and to the 9th Army went
out: ‘I will fight as long as I have a single soldier. When the last
soldier deserts me, I will shoot myself.’ Late that night, he still
exuded confidence in Steiner’s attack. When Koller told him of the

inadequacies of the Luftwaffe troops he had been compelled to
supply to Steiner’s forces, Hitler replied: ‘You will see. The Russians
will suffer the greatest defeat, the bloodiest defeat in their history
before the gates of the city of Berlin.’

It was bravado. Two hours earlier, Dr Morell had found him
drained and dejected in his study. The doctor and his medications,
however little efficacious in an objective sense, had been for years
an important psychological prop for Hitler. Now, Morell wanted to
give him a harmless further dose of glucose. Without any
forewarning, Hitler reacted in an uncontrollable outburst, accusing
Morell of wanting to drug him with morphine. He knew, he said,
that the generals wanted to have him drugged so that they could
ship him off to Berchtesgaden. ‘Do you take me for a madman?’
Hitler railed. Threatening to have him shot, he furiously dismissed
the quivering doctor.

The storm had been brewing for days. It burst on the afternoon of
22 April, during the briefing that began at 3.30 p.m. Even as the
briefing began, Hitler looked haggard, stony-faced, though
extremely agitated, as if his thoughts were elsewhere. He twice left
the room to go to his private quarters. Then, as dismaying news
came through that Soviet troops had broken the inner defence
cordon and were within Berlin’s northern suburbs, Hitler was finally
told — after a frantic series of telephone calls had elicited
contradictory information — that Steiner’s attack, which he had
impatiently awaited all morning, had not taken place after all. At
this, he seemed to snap. He ordered everyone out of the briefing
room, apart from Keitel, Jodl, Krebs, and Burgdorf. Even for those
who had long experience of Hitler’s furious outbursts, the tirade
which thundered through the bunker for the next half an hour was a
shock. One who witnessed it reported that evening: ‘Something
broke inside me today that I still can’t grasp.’ Hitler screamed that
he had been betrayed by all those he had trusted. He railed at the
long-standing treachery of the army. Now, even the SS was lying to
him: after Sepp Dietrich’s failure in Hungary, Steiner had not
attacked. The troops would not fight, he ranted, the anti-tank

defences were down. As Jodl added, he also knew that munitions
and fuel would shortly run out.

Hitler slumped into his chair. The storm subsided. His voice fell
to practically a whimper. The war was lost, he sobbed. It was the
first time any of his small audience had heard him admit it. They
were dumbstruck. He had therefore determined to stay in Berlin, he
went on, and to lead the defence of the city. He was physically
incapable of fighting himself, and ran the risk of falling wounded
into the hands of the enemy. So he would at the last moment shoot
himself. All prevailed upon him to change his mind. He should leave
Berlin forthwith and move his headquarters to Berchtesgaden. The
troops should be withdrawn from the western front and deployed in
the east. Hitler replied that everything was falling apart anyway.
He could not do that. Goring could do it. Someone objected that no
soldier would fight for the Reich Marshal. ‘What does it mean:
fight!’ asked Hitler. ‘There’s not much more to fight for, and if it’s a
matter of negotiations the Reich Marshal can do that better than I
can.’

At this, Hitler, his face a deathly pallor, left the briefing room
and retreated to his own quarters. He sent for his remaining
secretaries, Gerda Christian and Traudl Junge, and his dietician,
Constanze Manziarly. Eva Braun was also present as he told his staff
they should get ready; a plane would take them south in an hour.
‘It’s all lost,’ he said, ‘hopelessly lost.’ Somewhat to their own
surprise, his secretaries found themselves rejecting the offer to
leave and telling Hitler that they would stay with him in the
bunker. Eva Braun had already told Hitler she was not leaving.

Urgent telephone calls were meanwhile put through from Donitz
and Himmler. Neither could persuade him to change his mind.
Ribbentrop arrived. He was not even allowed to see Hitler.
Goebbels was also present. Hitler, highly disturbed, had telephoned
him around five o’clock, raving about treachery, betrayal, and
cowardice. Goebbels hurried as fast as he could to the bunker, and
spoke a while alone with Hitler. He was able to calm him down.
Goebbels emerged to announce that on the Fihrer’s orders, he, his

wife, and his children would be moving into the bunker and living
there from now on. For the Propaganda Minister, Hitler’s decision
was the logical consequence of his consistent stance; he saw it in
full pathos as a historic deed which determined the heroic end in
Berlin of a latter-day Siegfried, betrayed by all around him.

For hard-headed military men like Karl Koller, the perspective
was very different: Hitler was abandoning the German people at the
time of their greatest need; he had renounced his responsibility to
armed forces, state, and people at the most critical moment; it was
dereliction of duty worse than many offences for which draconian
retribution had been meted out.

There were indeed serious practical considerations following
from Hitler’s hysterical behaviour. He had simply said he was
staying in Berlin. The others should leave and go where they
wanted. He had no further orders for the Wehrmacht. But he was
still supreme commander. Who was now to give orders? Berlin was
doomed for certain within a few days. So where were Wehrmacht
Headquarters to be? How could forces simply be withdrawn from
the western front without any armistice negotiations? After fruitless
pleading with Hitler, Keitel decided to travel to the headquarters of
General Wenck’s 12th Army. Hitler had finally agreed to sign an
order to Wenck to abandon his previous operational plans —
defending against the Americans on the Elbe — and march on Berlin,
linking up with the remnants of the 9th Army, still fighting to the
south of the city. The aim was to cut off enemy forces to the south-
west of the capital, drive forward ‘and liberate again the Reich
capital where the Fuhrer resides, trusting in his soldiers’. Wenck’s
army had been hastily put together at the beginning of April. It was
inadequately armed; its panzer support was weak; and many of its
troops were poorly trained. They were outnumbered by the Soviet
troops facing them, and possessed only a quarter of the weaponry.
What Wenck was supposed to do in the unlikely event of breaking
through to the centre of Berlin —- other than bringing out Hitler, if
need be by force (as Keitel later put it) — was left entirely unclear.

Hitler, his equilibrium now temporarily restored, was solicitous
enough to make sure that Keitel was well fed before he set out on
his journey. Jodl was meanwhile to take steps to ensure that part of
the High Command of the Wehrmacht was immediately transferred
to Berchtesgaden, while the remainder would be moved to the
barracks at Krampnitz, near Potsdam. Hitler’s overall direction
would remain intact, maintained through telephone links to
Krampnitz and Berchtesgaden. The regular briefings would
continue, though with reduced personnel.

Meanwhile, Hitler had ordered Schaub to burn all the papers and
documents in his private safe in the bunker. He was afterwards
instructed to do the same in Munich and at the Berghof. After a
perfunctory farewell from the master he had served for twenty
years, he left Berlin and flew south. The bunker company had by
now shrunk. Those left behind consoled themselves with drink.
They referred to the bunker as ‘the mortuary’ and its inmates as ‘a
show house of living corpses’. Their main topic of conversation was
when and how to commit suicide.

Remarkably, Hitler had regained his composure by the next
morning. He was still venting anger at troops that seemed to have
evaporated into thin air. ‘It’s so disgraceful,’ he fumed. ‘When you
think about it all, why still live!’ But Keitel’s news about his
meeting with Wenck had provided yet another glimmer of hope.
Hitler ordered all available troops, however ill-equipped, to be
added to Wenck’s army. Donitz had already been cabled the
previous evening to have all available sailors as the most urgent
priority, overriding all naval concerns, flown to Berlin to join the
‘German battle of fate’ in the Reich capital. Telegrams were also
dispatched to Himmler, and to Luftwaffe high command to send
their remaining reserves to aid the reinforcement of Berlin. ‘The
enemy knows I’m here,’ Hitler added, referring to Goebbels’s
proclamation to the Berlin people that day, telling them that the
Fuhrer would remain in the city to lead its defence. They would
concentrate all their efforts on taking the capital as soon as possible.
But that, thought Hitler, gave him a chance to lure them into the

trap of Wenck’s army. Krebs reckoned they still had four days. ‘In
four days the business has to be decided,’ agreed Hitler.

That afternoon, Albert Speer arrived back in the bunker. He had
had a tortuous ten-hour journey to cover less than 200 miles from
Hamburg. He had quickly given up an attempt to drive along roads
choked with refugees desperate to leave Berlin by any route still
open, and flew first to the airfield at Rechlin in Mecklenburg, then
on to Gatow aerodrome in the west of Berlin. There, he picked up a
Fieseler Storch light aircraft, eventually navigating a landing on the
East-West Axis approaching the Brandenburg Gate, the wide
boulevard on which he had triumphantly paraded six years earlier
during Hitler’s fiftieth birthday celebrations, now, its lamp-posts
removed, converted into a makeshift landing-strip. For weeks, Speer
had been working with industrialists and generals to sabotage
Hitler’s ‘scorched earth’ orders. Only two days earlier, in Hamburg,
he had recorded an address — never, in the event, broadcast, and
probably made with more than one eye on embellishing his own
prospects in a world after Hitler — urging an end to the pointless
destruction. But despite the growing alienation, Speer could still not
break free of Hitler. The emotional bonds remained strong. After his
unsung departure on the evening of Hitler’s birthday, the former
Armaments Minister felt unhappy at ending their special
relationship without an appropriate farewell. That was the reason
for his wholly unnecessary, extremely hazardous flight back into the
cauldron.

On his way to Hitler’s room in the bunker, he encountered
Bormann. Not anxious to end his own days in the bunker catacombs,
the Secretary to the Fithrer implored Speer to use his influence to
persuade Hitler to leave for the south. It was still just possible. In a
few more hours it would be too late. Speer gave a non-committal
reply. He was then ushered in to see Hitler, who, as Bormann had
foreseen, lost no time in asking Speer’s opinion whether he should
stay in Berlin or fly to Berchtesgaden. Speer did not hesitate. It
would be better to end his life as Fihrer in the Reich capital than in
his ‘weekend house’, he said. Hitler looked tired, apathetic,

resigned, burnt out. He had decided to stay in Berlin, he murmured.
He had just wanted to hear Speer’s opinion. As the previous day, he
said he would not fight. There was the danger that he would be
captured alive. He was also anxious to avoid his body falling into
the hands of his enemy to be displayed as a trophy. So he had given
orders to have his body burnt. Eva Braun would die alongside him.
‘Believe me, Speer,’ he added, ‘it will be easy to end my life. A brief
moment, and I am freed from everything, released from this
miserable existence.’

Minutes later, in the briefing — by now a far smaller affair, over
much more quickly, and, because of communications difficulties,
often lacking precise, up-to-date intelligence — Hitler, immediately
after speaking of his imminent death and cremation, was again
trying to exude optimism. Only now did Speer realize how much of
an act the role of Fiuhrer had always been.

All at once, there was a commotion in the corridor. Bormann
hurried in with a telegram for Hitler. It was from Goring. The
report of the momentous meeting the previous day, which Koller
had personally flown to Berchtesgaden to deliver verbally, had
placed the Reich Marshal in a quandary. Koller had helped persuade
a hesitant Goring that, through his actions, Hitler had in effect given
up the leadership of state and Wehrmacht. As a consequence, the
edict of 29 June 1941, nominating Goring as his successor in the
event of his incapacity to act, ought to come into force. Goring was
still unsure. He could not be certain that Hitler had not changed his
mind; and he worried about the influence of his arch-enemy,
Bormann. Eventually, Koller suggested sending a telegram. Goring
agreed. Koller, advised by Lammers, drafted its careful wording,
cautiously stipulating that, had Goring not heard by ten o’clock that
evening, he would presume that the terms of the succession law
would come into operation, and that he would take over the entire
leadership of the Reich. He would take immediate steps, he told
Koller, to surrender to the western powers, though not to the
Russians.

His telegram to Hitler (with a copy to Below, the Luftwaffe
adjutant still in the bunker) gave no inkling of disloyalty. But, as
Goring had feared, Bormann was immediately at work to place the
worst possible construction upon it. Hitler seemed at first
unconcerned, or apathetic. But when Bormann produced another
telegram from Goring, summoning Ribbentrop to see him
immediately, should he have received no other directive from Hitler
or himself by midnight, it was an easy matter to invoke the spectre
of treachery once more. Bormann was pushing at an open door. For
months, Goebbels (and Bormann himself ) had been the most
prominent among those urging Hitler to dismiss Goring, portrayed
as an incompetent, corrupt, drug-taking sybarite, single-handedly
responsible for the debacle of the Luftwaffe and the air-superiority
of the Allies, which they saw as so decisive for Germany’s plight.
Given Hitler’s extreme volatility, as the events of the previous day
had demonstrated only too plainly, the uncontrolled torrent of rage
at Goring’s ruination of the Luftwaffe, his corruption, and his
morphine addiction was utterly predictable.

Savouring his victory, Bormann swiftly drew up a telegram,
stripping Goring of his rights of succession, accusing him of treason,
but refraining from further measures if the Reich Marshal resigned
all his offices forthwith on health grounds. Goring’s agreement was
received within half an hour. But that evening, the once most
powerful man in the Reich after Hitler was nevertheless put under
house-arrest, the Berghof surrounded by SS guards. Hitler’s power
was fading fast; but it was not yet finally at an end.

Late that night, before leaving the bunker, Speer sat in Eva
Braun’s room, drinking a bottle of Moét & Chandon and eating
cakes and sweets. Eva seemed calm and relaxed. She told Speer that
Hitler had wanted to send her back to Munich, but she had refused;
she had come to Berlin to end it. At three in the morning, Hitler
appeared. Speer felt emotional at saying farewell. He had flown
back to the bunker precisely for this purpose. It was, for him, a
poignant moment. Hitler proffered a weak handshake. ‘Yow’re going
then. Good. Good-bye.’ That was all.

Another visitor besides Speer had arrived in the bunker
unannounced the previous evening: General Helmuth Weidling,
commander of the 56th Panzer Corps, attached to the 9th Army
fighting to the south-east of Berlin. Communications had been lost
with him since the evening of 20 April, and Hitler had ordered him
arrested for desertion. Astonishingly, he had made his way back to
Berlin, and into the Fuhrer Bunker, to protest his innocence. Hitler
was impressed. Next morning, he made Weidling responsible for
Berlin’s defence, replacing Colonel Ernst Kaether, who had held the
post for all of two days.

It was a daunting assignment. Weidling had at his disposal units
rapidly patched together, comprising 44,600 soldiers, along with
42,500 Volkssturm men (whose fighting capabilities were severely
limited on account both of their age and their miserable
equipment), around 2,700 boys from the Hitler Youth, and a few
hundred other ‘combatants’ from the Labour Service and
Organisation Todt, assigned to defend the bridges that Wenck’s
relieving army would have to cross. A further 5,500 sailors had
been promised by Donitz, but were not yet available. Facing them,
and closing in on the city by the hour, were some 2% million
combat troops in crack divisions of the Red Army. Weidling knew
from the start that his task was an impossible one.

The news from the ever-narrowing fronts around Berlin was
meanwhile becoming ever grimmer. By midday on 24 April, Soviet
troops from Zhukov’s and Konev’s armies had met up in the
southern suburbs of the city. The encirclement of Busse’s 9th Army
was complete. Hopes of it fighting its way through to the west to
join Wenck’s 12th Army - still only in the preparatory stage of its
march on the capital — were now illusory. Reports were reaching
the Reich Chancellery of bitter street fighting in eastern and
southern districts of the capital. Several districts to the north were
already in Soviet hands, and the Nauen road, the last main road to
the west, was blocked by T34 tanks. Tempelhof aerodrome, close to
the city centre, had been bombarded by Soviet artillery since
lunchtime. By the evening, Gatow airfield on the banks of the Havel

to the west of Berlin had also come under heavy shelling. The East-
West Axis, where Albert Speer had landed the previous day, was in
practice now Berlin’s last remaining thin artery of non-telephonic
communication with the outside world.

By dawn next morning, areas close to the city centre had started
to come under persistent and intense artillery fire. Around midday,
the spearhead of Konev’s army, skirting round Berlin to the south,
met up with forward units from Zhukov’s army, heading round the
city to the north, at Ketzin in the west. Berlin was as good as
encircled. About the same time, Soviet and American troops were
smoking cigarettes together at Torgau, on the Elbe, in central
Germany. The Reich was now cut in two.

Symbolically — there was absolutely no military purpose to the
operation (other than striking at the possible focus of continued
Nazi guerrilla warfare after formal cessation of hostilities from what
transpired to be a mythical ‘National Redoubt’) — Hitler’s alpine
palace, the Berghof, above Berchtesgaden, had been reduced to
smouldering ruins by RAF bombers that morning.

In his ever more isolated and beleaguered underground lair, with
communications rapidly worsening, and with operational charts
increasingly out of date and almost immediately overtaken by
events, Hitler was still sure that he knew best. ‘The situation in
Berlin looks worse than it is,’ he stated, with apparent confidence,
on 25 April, having not ventured out of doors for five days. He
ordered the city combed for all possible last reserves of manpower
to throw into the fray and help prepare the ground from within for
the arrival of Wenck. By this time, Wenck had made some advance
towards the lakes south of Potsdam. But parts of his army were still
engaged in combat with the Americans to the west, on the Elbe
north of Wittenberg. And only remnants were by now left of the 9th
Army, which was to have joined forces with him. With what he had
at his disposal, Wenck had only the remotest chance of reaching
Berlin.

But Wenck was now the only hope. Hitler was still looking for
one final victory, one last chance to turn the tables on his enemies.

Even now, he clung to the belief that the Alliance against him
would fall apart if he could deliver a stinging blow to the Red
Army. ‘I think the moment has come when out of self-preservation-
drive the others will confront in any case this hugely swollen
proletarian Bolshevik colossus and moloch ... If I can be successful
here and hold the capital, perhaps the hope will grow among the
English and Americans that they could maybe still face this whole
danger together with a Nazi Germany. And the only man for this is
me,’ he asserted.

His comments to Goebbels that day were in part still apparently
directed at convincing himself that his decision not to go to south
Germany and to stay in Berlin was the right one. ‘I’d regard it as a
thousand times more cowardly to commit suicide on the
Obersalzberg than to stand and fall here,’ he stated. ‘They shouldn’t
say: “You, as the Fuhrer ...” I’m only the Fuhrer as long as I can
lead. And I can’t lead through sitting somewhere on a mountain, but
have to have authority over armies that obey. Let me win a victory
here, however difficult and tough, then I’ve a right again to do
away with the sluggish elements who are constantly causing an
obstruction. Then I'll work with the generals who’ve proved
themselves.’

More than anything, Hitler’s words were aimed at his place in
history. Even now — egged on, naturally, by Goebbels — he remained
the propagandist, looking to image. Whether leading to glorious
victory, or sacrificial self-destruction, the last stand in the bunker
was necessary for prestige purposes. It never occurred to him to
question the continued slaughter of soldiers and civilians to that
end. ‘Only here can I attain a success,’ he told Goebbels, ‘... and
even if it’s only a moral one, it’s at least the possibility of saving
face and winning time.’ ‘Only through a heroic attitude can we
survive this hardest of times,’ he went on. If he won the ‘decisive
battle’ he would be ‘rehabilitated’. It would prove by example that
he had been right in dismissing generals for not holding their
ground.

And if he were to lose, then he would have perished ‘decently’,
not like some ‘inglorious refugee sitting in Berchtesgaden and
issuing useless orders from there’. He saw, he said, ‘a possibility of
repairing history’ through gaining a success. ‘It’s the only chance to
restore personal reputation ... If we leave the world stage in
disgrace, we’ll have lived for nothing. Whether you continue your
life a bit longer or not is completely immaterial. Rather end the
struggle in honour than continue in shame and dishonour a few
months or years longer.’ Goebbels, with Frederick the Great’s
exploits at the famous Battle of Leuthen — the Prussian King’s epic
victory in 1757 over an Austrian army far superior in numbers —
tripping once more from his tongue, summed up the ‘heroic’
alternatives: ‘If all goes well, then it’s in any case good. If things
don’t go well and the Fuhrer finds in Berlin an honourable death
and Europe were to become bolshevized, then in five years at the
latest the Fuhrer would be a legendary personality and National
Socialism would have attained mythical status.’

Ill

Not everyone in the maze of tunnels below the Reich Chancellery
was looking to share the ‘heroic’ end that Hitler and Goebbels were
contemplating. ‘I don’t want to die with that lot down there in the
bunker,’ thirty-one-year-old Major Bernd von Freytag-Loringhoven,
Krebs’s tall adjutant, uttered. ‘When it comes to the end, I want my
head above ground and free.’ Even the SS men from Hitler’s
bodyguard were anxiously asking about Wenck’s progress, consoling
themselves with drink when off duty, and looking for possible exit-
routes from what looked more and more like a certain grave. In the
streets above, despite the threat — often carried out — of summary
execution by ‘flying courts-martial’ for ‘defeatism’, let alone
desertion, many elderly Volkssturm men, aware of the utter futility
of carrying on such a hopeless unequal fight and looking to avoid a
pointless ‘hero’s’ death, sought any opportunity at the approach of

Soviet troops to melt away and try to rejoin families taking what
refuge they could in cellars and bunkers.

Amid the burning ruins of the great city, living conditions were
deteriorating rapidly. Food was running out. The water-supply
system had broken down. The old, infirm, wounded, women and
children, injured soldiers, refugees, all clung on to life in the cellars,
in packed shelters, and in underground stations as hell raged
overhead.

As communications increasingly petered out — the lines to Jodl at
OKH headquarters went dead for a time in the course of the evening
— ‘intelligence’ of troop movements in the city was gathered for the
once-mighty Army High Command in the bunker by using the
telephone directory to ring numbers at random. ‘Excuse me,
madam, have you seen the Russians?’ ran the question. ‘Yes,’ would
come a reply, ‘half an hour ago two of them were here. They were
part of a group of about a dozen tanks at the crossroads.’

Despite the uneven contest, the regular troops, mostly
insufficiently trained and badly equipped, often down to their last
reserves of ammunition, continued the bitter struggle in Berlin’s
streets. By the evening of 26 April, Soviet soldiers were close to
Alexanderplatz, the very heart of the city. The Reich Chancellery in
the government district, under heavy fire all day, was now less than
a mile away.

A fresh moment of excitement gripped the inmates of the bunker
during the early evening: the unexpected arrival of the wounded
Colonel-General of the Luftwaffe Robert Ritter von Greim, and his
glamorous female companion, twenty years his junior, the flying-
ace and test pilot Hanna Reitsch. Both were fervent, long-standing
admirers of Hitler. Greim had been summoned two days earlier to
Berlin. He and Reitsch had had to risk an extremely hazardous flight
from Munich. Greim’s foot had been injured when their Fieseler
Storch had been hit by artillery fire on approach to the centre of
Berlin, and Reitsch had grabbed the controls and brought the plane
down safely on the East-West Axis. They had then requisitioned a
car to bring them to the Reich Chancellery. Propped up by Reitsch,

the wounded Greim now limped painfully into the bunker. He still
did not know why he had come.

Once his foot had been bandaged, Hitler came in to tell him.
After railing at Goring’s ‘betrayal’, Hitler informed Greim that he
was promoting him to Field-Marshal and appointing him as the new
head of the Luftwaffe. It could all have been done by telephone.
Instead, Greim had had to risk life and limb to receive the news in
person. And, it seemed likely, he and Reitsch were now doomed to
end their lives in the bunker. But far from being infuriated or
depressed, or both, Greim and Reitsch were exhilarated. They
begged to stay in the bunker with Hitler. They were given phials of
poison, should the worst happen. But Hitler persuaded Greim that
all was not lost. ‘Just don’t lose faith,’ Koller heard Greim say, when
he telephoned the bunker. ‘It'll all come to a good end. The meeting
with the Fuhrer and his vigour have given me extraordinary new
strength. It’s like the fountain of youth here.’ Koller thought it
sounded more like a madhouse.

The briefing sessions were by this time much reduced in size and
changed in character. Krebs was now the only senior military figure
present. Goebbels had joined since taking up residence in the
bunker. Hitler Youth Leader Axmann, General Weidling (responsible
for the defence of Berlin), Vice-Admiral Vof$ (Donitz’s liaison),
Colonel Nicolaus von Below (the long-serving Luftwaffe adjutant),
and SS-Brigadefthrer Wilhelm Mohnke, just appointed by Hitler as
commandant of the government quarter of Berlin (which had been
dubbed ‘The Citadel’) were also present.

Discussion at the first meeting on 27 April, in the early hours,
centred on the prospects of Wenck breaking through. He had
reached the outskirts of Potsdam. But he had only three divisions at
his disposal. He desperately needed reinforcements. The chances of
Busse’s beleaguered 9th Army forcing their way north-westwards to
join him were now slim in the extreme. But there were still hopes
that troops under Lieutenant-General Rudolf Holste, to the north-
west of Berlin, might fight their way south to link up with Wenck.
Time was short. Krebs reported heavy street-fighting in the heart of

the city. The Soviets had advanced on Alexanderplatz. They would
soon have Potsdamer Platz in their sights; and that was where the
bunker was situated. ‘May God let Wenck come!’ intoned Goebbels.
‘A dreadful situation crosses my mind,’ he added, grimly. ‘Wenck is
located at Potsdam, and here the Soviets are pressing on Potsdamer
Platz!’ ‘And I’m not in Potsdam, but in Potsdamer Platz,’
commented Hitler laconically.

His assessment of the situation was realistic: Wenck’s three
divisions were not enough. They might suffice to take Potsdam, but
they were only infantry divisions, lacking panzer support, and not
capable of breaking their way through the Soviet tank units. Vo
breathed encouragement. ‘Wenck will get here, my Fuhrer! It’s only
a question of whether he can do it alone.’ It was enough for Hitler
to lapse into a new reverie. ‘You’ve got to imagine. That’ll spread
like wildfire through the whole of Berlin when it’s known: a
German army has broken through in the west and established
contact with the Citadel.’ The Soviets, he thought, had suffered
great losses, were suffering even more in the intense house-to-house
fighting, and could only throw more troops into exposed forward
positions. The thought sufficed: he had convinced himself that the
situation was not wholly bleak. The constant explosions had kept
him awake in recent nights. But he would sleep better tonight, he
said. He only wanted to be awakened ‘if a Russian tank is standing
in front of my cabin’ so that he had time to do what was necessary.

The second briefing of the day began with Mohnke announcing
that the first enemy tanks had managed to penetrate to the
Wilhelmplatz, the heart of the government quarter. They had been
repulsed — on this occasion — but time was running out. Krebs
reckoned the bunker residents had no more than about twenty-four
to twenty-six hours; the link-up between the armies of Wenck and
Busse had to take place within that time if there was to be any
hope. Hitler inwardly knew, however, that this would not happen.
He repeatedly bemoaned ‘the catastrophic mistake’ of the 9th Army,
which he blamed for ignoring his orders and trying to penetrate the
Soviet lines in the wrong direction. The faint hopes from the

remaining forces in the north, those of Holste and Steiner (in whom
Hitler had lost all confidence days earlier), were now also —
realistically, if not in dreams — largely abandoned.

Despite a desperate plea from Keitel to throw everything into the
relief of Berlin, Jodl had diverted the hard-pressed units of Holste
and Steiner to fend off Soviet forces to the north of the capital. It
was tantamount to giving up on Berlin. Bormann scathingly
commented in his diary, in remarks pointedly directed at
Reichsfitthrer-SS Himmler’s recognized reluctance to deploy Steiner’s
SS corps to help save Berlin: ‘The divisions marching to our relief
are held up by Himmler-Jodl! We will stand and fall with the
Fuhrer: loyal into death. Others believe they have to act “from
higher insight”. They sacrifice the Fuhrer, and their lack of loyalty —

99 9

shame on them —- matches their “feeling of honour”.

Hitler and Goebbels relapsed into reminiscences. They were
prompted by Mohnke’s remark, entirely without irony: ‘We haven’t
quite brought about what we wanted in 1933, my Fuhrer!’ Hitler’s
explanation — it had scarcely been in his mind at the time — was that
he had come to power too early. A year or more later, at
Hindenburg’s death, would have been the right time. To bring about
a complete revolution, the old system needed to have revealed itself
as utterly bankrupt. As it was, he had been forced to compromise
with Hugenberg, Schleicher — not much of a compromise since the
former Reich Chancellor had, in fact, been murdered by Hitler’s
henchmen at the time of the ‘Rohm affair’ in 1934 — and other
pillars of the old order. By the time of Hindenburg’s death, Hitler
went on, the determination to rid himself of the conservatives had
lessened, and the work of reconstruction was under way.
‘Otherwise, thousands would have been eliminated at that time,’ he
declared. ‘It could have happened, if I had come to power through
an express will of the people’— presumably meaning a presidential
election — ‘or through a putsch. You regret it afterwards that you
are so good,’ he concluded.

This took the discussion inexorably once more back into pathos
and an evocation of ‘heroism’. He was staying in Berlin, Hitler said,

‘so that I have more moral right to act against weakness ... I can’t
constantly threaten others if I run away myself from the Reich
capital at the critical hour ... I’ve had the right to command in this
city. Now I must obey the commands of fate. Even if I could save
myself, I won’t do it. The captain also goes down with his ship.’
Vols, predictably, picked up the metaphor. Pathos and emotion got
the better of him, too. ‘Here in the Reich Chancellery it’s just like
the command-bridge of a ship,’ he implausibly ruminated. ‘One
thing here applies to all. We don’t want to get away.’ (He would,
ultimately, like most of the others, nevertheless seek to flee the
bunker at the last moment.) ‘We belong together. It’s only a matter
of being an upright community.’

The news trickling in during the day could scarcely have been
worse. Wenck’s troops, without assistance from the 9th Army
(whose encirclement was by now accepted as practically a foregone
conclusion), had been pushed back south of Potsdam. There was a
‘doomsday’ mood in the bunker, alleviated only by copious supplies
of alcohol and food from the Reich Chancellery cellars. Hitler told
Below he had decided to give Weidling, the Commandant of Berlin,
the order to break out. All his staff should go, as well as Bormann
and Goebbels. He would stay behind and die in the capital. By
evening, amid worsening news, he had changed his mind. An
attempt to break out would be useless. He gave Below a poison-
capsule, should it come to ‘a difficult situation’.

The fate of the encircled 9th Army, with its eleven divisions
almost four times as strong as the forces at Wenck’s disposal, took
Hitler back, like a long-playing record, at the third briefing of the
day to what he saw as constant disobedience and disloyalty in the
army. Only Schorner, commander of Army Group Centre, was
singled out for praise as ‘a true warlord’. Donitz, too, stood in high
favour for holding to his promise to send naval units to the defence
of Berlin, and to Hitler’s personal protection. The faint hope in

Wenck was still not totally extinguished. But Hitler was looking to
the last stand in the ‘Citadel’. Firm command and reliable troops for
the defence of the ‘Citadel’ were vital. His fear of capture surfaced
again. ‘I must have the absolute certainty,’ he said, following news
that enemy tanks had for a short time forced their way into
Wilhelmstrafse, ‘that I will not be dragged out through some crafty
trick by a Russian tank.’ He saw it as only a question of time before
the Soviets brought up heavy artillery to shell the ‘Citadel’ from
close range. ‘It’s a matter then of a heroic struggle for a last small
island,’ he commented. ‘If the relief doesn’t arrive, we have to be
clear: it’s no bad end to a life to fall in the struggle for the capital of
your Reich.’

Not everyone was willing to join a suicide pact. Hermann
Fegelein, the swashbuckling, womanizing, cynical opportunist who
had risen to high position in the SS through Himmler’s favour then
sealed his bonds to Hitler’s ‘court’ through marrying Eva Braun’s
sister, had disappeared from the bunker. His absence was noticed on
27 April. And that evening he was discovered in civilian clothes in
his apartment in Charlottenburg, worse the wear from drink, and
with a good deal of money in bags packed for departure. He rang
Eva Braun to have his sister-in-law intercede. (It seems, in fact, that
he may have been more attracted to Eva Braun than he was to her
sister; and that he had been in touch with her beforehand from his
apartment, attempting to persuade her to leave the bunker before it
was too late.) But it was to no avail. He was hauled back into the
Reich Chancellery that evening in deep disgrace, stripped of his
epaulettes and collar flashes, reduced to the ranks, and kept in an
improvised cell until Hitler was ready to see him.

In the early hours of 28 April, despairing calls were made from
the bunker to Keitel and Jodl urging all conceivable effort to be
made to relieve Berlin as absolute priority. Time was of the essence.
There were at most forty-eight hours, it was thought. ‘If no help
comes within that time, it will be too late,’ Krebs told Keitel. “The
Fuhrer passes that on again!!!’ From Wenck, there was nothing but
silence.

As so often, the bunker inmates thought they smelled the scent of
disloyalty and treason. Bormann telegraphed Puttkamer that
evening: ‘Instead of spurring on the troops who should liberate us
with orders and appeals, the men in authority are silent. Loyalty has
given way to disloyalty. We remain here. The Reich Chancellery is
already a heap of ruins.’ In his desk diary, the entry was of high
treason and betrayal of the country.

An hour later, the suspicions seemed dramatically confirmed.
Heinz Lorenz appeared in the bunker. He had just picked up a
message from Reuters, sent by the BBC in London and confirmed in
Stockholm. He gave one copy to Bormann, whom he found sitting
with Goebbels and Hewel. The other copy he handed to Linge to
pass on to Hitler. It confirmed the truth of a disturbing story
broadcast in the morning news of Radio Stockholm, relayed to
Hitler in mid-afternoon, though initially seeming to lack substance:
that the Reichsfiihrer-SS, Heinrich Himmler, had offered to
surrender to the western Allies, but that this had been declined.
Hitler had at first received the news of Himmler’s discussions about
capitulation ‘with complete contempt’. He had immediately
telephoned Admiral Donitz, who had said he knew nothing of it.
Donitz then in turn contacted Himmler, who categorically denied
the report and recommended ignoring it rather than putting out a
denial on the radio. But Hitler continued to brood on it. Perhaps he
was expecting something of the sort. His distrust of Himmler had
grown in recent weeks. The disobedience, as he saw it, of Sepp
Dietrich in Hungary and of Felix Steiner in the failure to attempt the
relief of Berlin showed, it seemed, that even the SS were now
disloyal to him. As the day wore on, so it appeared to Below,
Hitler’s bitterness towards Himmler mounted.

And now it all fell into place: the earlier story had been correct,
and Himmler’s denial a lie. More than that: the Reuters report had
added that ‘Himmler had informed the western Allies that he could
implement an unconditional surrender and support it.’ It amounted
to an implication that the Reichsftihrer-SS was now de facto head of

state, that Hitler had been disempowered. This was a bombshell.
This could on no account be tolerated. This was base treason.

Whether Hitler had earlier been aware of Himmler’s tentative
steps towards the western powers through the intermediacy of
Count Folke Bernadotte, Vice-President of the Swedish Red Cross
and a close relative of the King of Sweden, is uncertain. The
Reichsfihrer’s dealings with Bernadotte had stretched back some
two months. SS-Brigadefihrer Walter Schellenberg, head of the
Foreign Intelligence Service in the Reich Security Main Office, had
instigated the meetings and acted as intermediary. Bernadotte’s
initial aim had been to bargain for the release of prisoners —
particularly Scandinavians — from concentration camps. From
Himmler’s point of view, urged on by Schellenberg, Bernadotte
offered a possible opening to the West. As Germany’s military
situation had drastically deteriorated, Himmler, still hesitant and
evidently under great nervous strain, had become more amenable to
gestures at humanitarian concessions aimed at showing himself in as
good a light as possible. Like most Nazi leaders, he was looking to
survive, not throw himself on the funeral pyre in the Berlin
Gotterdammerung. In March, he had agreed, in contravention of
Hitler’s wishes, to allow concentration camps to be handed over to
the approaching enemy, not destroyed. He had conceded the release
of small numbers of Jews and other prisoners, to be sent to
Switzerland and Sweden. At his second meeting with Bernadotte at
the beginning of April, he had also consented to let Danish and
Norwegian women and the sick in camps be taken to Sweden. At the
same time, he still regarded the camp prisoners as his ‘hostages’ —
bargaining counters in any negotiations with the West.

Bernadotte had brushed aside Schellenberg’s suggestion — almost
certainly prompted by Himmler — that he might sound out
Eisenhower about the possibility of a surrender in the west. Such a
proposition, Bernadotte had pointed out, had to come from the
Reichsfiihrer himself. Himmler was, however, in a state of chronic
indecision as well as extreme nervous tension. He saw clearly the
writing on the wall; the war was irredeemably lost. But he was well

aware that Hitler would take Germany down into perdition with
him rather than capitulate. Himmler, in common with most Nazi
leaders, wanted to save his own skin. And he still hankered after
some role in a post-Hitler settlement. As dogmatic as Hitler in the
fight against Bolshevism, he harboured the notable illusion that the
enemy might overlook his part in monstrous crimes against
humanity because of his value to the continuation of the struggle
against the mortal enemy not just of Germany, but also of the West.
He could not, however, even now free himself from his bonds with
Hitler. He still hankered after Hitler’s favour, and was distressed at
the way he had fallen into discredit after his failure as commander
of Army Group Vistula. Not least: now, as before, he feared Hitler.

A third meeting with Bernadotte on 21 April, at which the
Reichsftihrer-SS looked extremely drawn and in a highly nervous
state, made no progress on the issue of overtures to the West.
Himmler still remained ultra-cautious, unwilling to risk any
initiative. Possibly, as Schellenberg later suggested, he had already
decided by lunchtime on 22 April that the time had come to act,
though this seems doubtful. What certainly convinced him was the
news which Fegelein telephoned through to him from the Fuhrer
Bunker that day of Hitler’s extraordinary fit of pent-up fury and his
uncontrolled tirade against treachery on all sides — not least directed
at the SS on account of Steiner’s failure to launch the ordered
counter-offensive — culminating in his announcement that he would
stay and die in Berlin. At this, Himmler’s indecision evaporated.

On 23 April, Count Bernadotte had agreed, somewhat reluctantly,
to Schellenberg’s suggestion to meet Himmler for a fourth time that
evening. The meeting took place in the Swedish Consulate in
Ltbeck, eerily lit by candles because of a power cut. ‘Hitler is very
probably already dead,’ Himmler began. At any rate, his end could
be no more than a few days away. Before now, his oath of loyalty
had prevented him from acting, Himmler went on. But with Hitler
dead or on the verge of death, the situation was different. He now
had a free hand. There could be no surrender to the Soviet Union.
He was, and always would be, the sworn enemy of Bolshevism. He

insisted that the struggle against Bolshevism must continue. But he
was ready to declare Germany defeated by the western powers, and
begged Bernadotte to pass his offer of capitulation to General
Eisenhower in order to prevent further senseless destruction. Still
by candlelight, Himmler drafted a letter to Sweden’s Foreign
Minister, to be handed to him by Bernadotte, and passed on to the
western Allies.

Himmler, like Goring (if in a different way), had taken the news
of Hitler’s outburst on 22 April to imply the Fthrer’s effective
abdication. Like Goring, Himmler was soon to be disabused of such
presumption. His immediate instinct, however, now that his own
decision had been clarified, was to build a cabinet, invent (at
Schellenberg’s suggestion) the name for a new party — the ‘Party of
National Concentration’ — and ponder whether he should bow or
shake hands when he met Eisenhower. It apparently never occurred
to him that his offer of capitulation might be turned down. But that
outcome — as good as certain to all beyond the perimeters of the
detached mental world of Nazi leaders at this juncture — was
precisely what had happened by the time, during the course of the
afternoon of 28 April, the sensational news filtered out that the
Reichsftihrer-SS was willing to capitulate.

For Hitler, this was the last straw. That his ‘loyal Heinrich’,
whose SS had as its motto ‘My honour is loyalty’, should now stab
him in the back: this was the end. It was the betrayal of all
betrayals. The bunker reverberated to a final elemental explosion of
fury. All his stored-up venom was now poured out on Himmler in a
last paroxysm of seething rage. It was, he screamed, ‘the most
shameful betrayal in human history’.

When the outburst subsided, Hitler retired to his rooms with
Goebbels and Bormann for a lengthy discussion. As soon as he
reappeared, he sent for the imprisoned Fegelein and subjected him
to a fearsome verbal assault. Fegelein’s recent disappearance now
appeared to have sinister significance: joining the base treachery of
the Reichsftihrer-SS. Hitler’s paranoid suspicions were running riot.
Possibly Himmler was plotting to assassinate him; or to hand him

over to the enemy. And Fegelein was part of the plot. Out of
consideration for Eva Braun, Hitler’s first, relatively lenient,
reaction to Fegelein’s desertion had been to have her disgraced
brother-in-law assigned to Mohnke’s troops for the defence of
Berlin. But Giinsche and Bormann had persuaded Hitler to hand him
over to a court martial instead. One was now hastily improvised.
After the merest formalities, Fegelein was summarily sentenced to
death, immediately taken out, then shot in the back by an SD man
even before he could be put in front of a firing-squad. For some of
the bunker inmates, there was a sense of shock that one from within
the ‘inner circle’ was guilty of such ‘betrayal’, and had been so
peremptorily dispatched. For Hitler, it was the closest he could
come to revenge on the Reichsfihrer-SS himself.

By now, Soviet troops had forced their way into Potsdamer Platz
and streets in the immediate vicinity of the Reich Chancellery. They
were no more than a few hundred yards away. A breakdown in
communications for most of the day had left the bunker inmates
desperate for any news of Wenck’s army (which remained, hemmed
in, south of Potsdam). In the prevailing climate within the bunker,
even the lapdog Keitel and the ever-reliable Jodl were now coming
under suspicion of treachery for not bringing about the relief of
Berlin.

Soon after midnight, following Fegelein’s execution, Hitler
commissioned Greim to deploy the Luftwaffe in making every effort
to aid Wenck through attacks on Soviet positions blocking his route
to Berlin. It was the faintest of faint hopes. He had a second
commission for Greim — one, if anything, even more important.
Greim was to leave Berlin and fly to Donitz in Plon to ensure that
the traitor, Himmler, was arrested — better still, liquidated
forthwith. To this end, an Arado 96 training plane had been ordered
to Berlin from Rechlin and, astonishingly, had defied all odds in
touching down on the East-West Axis. Protesting their wish to stay

with Hitler in the bunker, Greim, on crutches and far from
recovered from his injured foot, and his companion Hanna Reitsch
nonetheless accepted the commission, were driven in an armoured
vehicle to the plane, waiting close to the Brandenburg Gate,
managed to take off, and, even more remarkably, to negotiate the
heavy Soviet anti-aircraft fire to fly to Rechlin, from where they
later flew to Plon. The perilous journey was pointless. The few
planes Greim was able to order into the defence of Berlin made not
the slightest difference. And by the time he reached Donitz’s
headquarters, the Grand Admiral had nothing to gain by having
Himmler arrested, let alone shot. Even avoiding death in the bunker
was no consolation to Greim and Reitsch. ‘It is the greatest sorrow
of our lives that we were not permitted to die with the Fuhrer,’ they
chorused some days later. ‘One should kneel in reverence at the
altar of the Fatherland and pray.’

After Greim and Reitsch had left, Hitler became calmer. It was
time to make preparations. As long as Hitler had had a future, he
had ruled out marriage. His life, he had said, was devoted to
Germany. There was no room for a wife. It had also been politically
inconvenient. No one outside the inner circle was to know of Eva
Braun’s existence. She had been forced to accept that she was no
more than an appendage, there when Hitler wanted her to be,
stored well out of sight for the rest of the time. But she had chosen
to come to the bunker. And she had refused Hitler’s own entreaties
to leave. She had committed herself to him once and for all, when
others were deserting. The marriage now cost him nothing. He did
it simply to please Eva Braun, to give her what she had wanted
more than anything at a moment when marrying him was the least
enviable fate in the world.

Eva Braun had dropped a hint earlier in the day that this would
be her wedding night. Now, following the departure of Greim and
Reitsch, not long after midnight on 29 April, in the most macabre
surrounds, with the bunker shaking from nearby explosions, Hitler
and Eva Braun exchanged married vows in the conference-room in
front of one of Goebbels’s minor officials, city councillor Walter

Wagner, dressed in Nazi uniform with a Volkssturm armband, who
had been brought to the bunker in an armoured car to conduct the
bizarre ceremony. Goebbels and Bormann were witnesses. The rest
of the staff waited outside to congratulate the newly wedded
couple. Champagne, sandwiches, and reminiscences — with
somewhat forced joviality — of happier days followed.

Just before the wedding ceremony, Hitler had asked his youngest
secretary, Traudl Junge, to go with him to the room where his
military conferences took place. It had been about 11.30 p.m. when
he said that he wanted her to take down some dictation. She was
still wondering what this might be at such a late hour when, leaning
on the table, he started to dictate his last will and testament.

He began with a brief Private Testament. He referred first to his
marriage to Eva Braun, and her decision to come to Berlin and die
at his side. He disposed of his possessions to the party — or, should it
no longer exist, to the state; he still hoped his collection of paintings
would go to a gallery in Linz; and he appointed Martin Bormann as
executor to see that relatives and his long-serving staff had some
reward for their support.

He came to the more significant part. ‘This is my political
testament,’ he declared. Traudl Junge paused for a moment,
expectantly. But she had heard it all before. His last words for
posterity were a piece of pure self-justification. The rhetoric is
instantly recognizable, redolent of Mein Kampf and countless
speeches; the central idea of the responsibility of international
Jewry for the death, suffering, and destruction in the war remained
unchanged, even as he himself now looked death in the face. ‘It is
untrue that I or anyone else in Germany wanted the war in 1939,’
he dictated. ‘It was desired and instigated exclusively by those
international statesmen who were either of Jewish descent or who
worked for Jewish interests ... Centuries will pass away, but out of
the ruins of our towns and cultural monuments the hatred will ever
renew itself against those ultimately responsible whom we have to
thank for everything: international Jewry and its helpers.’ The
conspiracy theory continued unabated. He attributed the rejection

of his proposal on the eve of the attack on Poland partly to the
business interests of ‘leading circles in English politics’, partly to the
‘influence of propaganda organized by international Jewry’.

He came to a key passage — an oblique reference to the ‘Final
Solution’ — relating once more to the fulfilment of the ‘prophecy’ of
1939: ‘I also left no doubt that, if the nations of Europe are again to
be regarded as mere blocks of shares of these international money
and finance conspirators, then that race, too, which is really guilty
of this murderous struggle, will be called to account: Jewry! I
further left no one in doubt that this time millions of children of
Europe’s aryan peoples would not die of hunger, millions of grown
men would not suffer death, and hundreds of thousands of women
and children not be burnt and bombed to death in the towns,
without the real culprit having to atone for his guilt, even if by
more humane means.’

Despite all its setbacks, the six-year struggle, he went on, would
one day go down in history as ‘the most glorious and valiant
manifestation of a nation’s will to existence’. He himself could not
forsake Berlin. The forces there were too small to hold out against
the enemy and - the inevitable side-swipe against those deemed to
have betrayed him —- ‘our own resistance is gradually devalued by
deluded and characterless subjects’. He would choose death at the
appropriate moment.

Again, he gave an indication of his own fear of what he saw as
the still dominant power of the Jews: ‘I do not wish to fall into the
hands of enemies who, for the amusement of their whipped-up
masses, will need a spectacle arranged by Jews.’

A renaissance of National Socialism, he avowed, would eventually
emerge from the sacrifice of the soldiers and his own death
alongside them. He ended with an exhortation to continue the
struggle. He begged the heads of the armed forces to instil the spirit
of National Socialism in the troops. His long-standing scapegoat, the
officer corps of the army, did not even now go unscathed: ‘May it at
some time be part of the concept of honour of the German officer —
as is already the case in our navy — that the surrender of a district or

a town is impossible and that above all the leaders have to proceed
here with a shining example in most loyal fulfilment of their duty
unto death.’

In the second part of his Testament, Hitler went through the
charade of nominating a successor government for what was left of
the Reich. The tone was vindictive. Goring and Himmler were
formally expelled from the party and from all their offices for the
damage they had done through negotiating with the enemy ‘without
my knowledge and against my wishes’, for attempting to take
power in the state, and for disloyalty to his person. Nor was there
any place in the new government for Speer. The new head of state
and head of the armed forces was Grand Admiral Donitz — less of a
surprise than at first sight, given his specially high standing in
Hitler’s eyes in the closing phase of the war, and in view
particularly of the responsibility he had already been given a few
days earlier for party and state affairs as well as military matters in
the northern part of the country. Significantly, however, Donitz was
not to inherit the title of Fiihrer. Instead, the title of Reich
President, dropped in 1934 on Hindenburg’s death, was reinvented.
Goebbels, who had been pressing for so long for full control over
internal affairs, was rewarded for his loyalty by being appointed
Chancellor of a Reich that scarcely any longer existed. Bormann,
another who had proved his loyalty, was made Party Minister.
Goebbels — who, together with Bormann, kept bringing Fraulein
Junge the names of further ministers for typing in the list —
probably engineered the dismissal at this late point of his old
adversary Ribbentrop, and his replacement as Foreign Minister by
Arthur Sey{$-Inquart. Hitler’s favourite general, Schorner, was to be
Commander-in-Chief of the Army, while Gauleiter Karl Hanke, still
holding out in Breslau, was to take over from Himmler as
Reichsfithrer-SS and Chief of the German Police. The tough Munich
Gauleiter, Paul Giesler, was made Interior Minister, with Karl-Otto
Saur replacing Speer as Minister for Armaments. The pointless job
of Propaganda Minister fell to Goebbels’s State Secretary, Werner
Naumann. Old survivors included Schwerin-Krosigk (Finance), Funk

(Economics), Thierack (Justice), and Herbert Backe (Agriculture).
Hitler commissioned them with continuing the task — ‘the work of
coming centuries’ — of building up a National Socialist state. ‘Above
all,’ the Political Testament concluded, ‘I charge the leadership of
the nation and their subjects with the meticulous observance of the
race-laws and the merciless resistance to the universal poisoner of
all peoples, international Jewry.’

It was turned 4 a.m. when Goebbels, Bormann, Burgdorf, and
Krebs signed the Political Testament, and Nicolaus von Below added
his signature to the Private Testament.

Hitler, looking weary, took himself off to rest. He had completed
the winding-up order on the Third Reich. Only the final act of self-
destruction remained.

For Fraulein Junge, however, the night’s secretarial duties were
not yet over. Soon after Hitler had retired, Goebbels, in a highly
emotional state, white-faced, tears running down his cheeks,
appeared in the anteroom, where she was finishing her work. He
asked her to draft his own coda to Hitler’s will. Hitler, he said, had
ordered him to leave Berlin as a member of the new government.
But ‘if the Fuhrer is dead, my life is meaningless’, he told her. Of all
the Nazi leaders, Goebbels was the one who for weeks had assessed
with some realism the military prospects, had repeatedly evoked
the imagery of heroism, looking to his own place in the pantheon of
Teutonic heroes, and had accordingly brought his wife and children
to the bunker to die alongside their adored Leader in a final act of
Nibelungentreue. It was, therefore, utterly consistent when he now
dictated: ‘For the first time in my life, I must categorically refuse to
obey an order of the Fuhrer.’ His wife and children joined him in
this refusal. He would, he continued, lose all self-respect — quite
apart from the demands of personal loyalty — were he to ‘leave the
Fuhrer alone in his hour of greatest need’. Betrayal was in his mind,
as in that of his master. ‘In the delirium of treachery, which
surrounds the Fuhrer in these critical days of the war,’ he had
Fraulein Junge type, ‘there have to be at least a few who stay
unconditionally loyal to him even unto death, even if this

contradicts a formal, objectively well-founded order which finds
expression in his Political Testament.’ Consequently, he — together
with his wife and children (who, were they old enough to judge,
would be in agreement) — were firmly resolved not to leave the
Reich capital ‘and rather at the Fuhrer’s side to end a life which for
me personally has no further value if it cannot be used in the
service of the Fuhrer and by his side’. It was 5.30 a.m. before this
last act in the nocturnal drama closed.

The mood in the bunker now sank to zero-level. Despair was now
written on everyone’s face. All knew it was only a matter of hours
before Hitler killed himself, and wondered what the future held for
them after his death. There was much talk of the best methods of
committing suicide. Secretaries, adjutants, and any others who
wanted them had by now been given the brass-cased ampoules
containing prussic acid supplied by Dr Ludwig Stumpfegger, the SS
surgeon who had joined the ‘court’ the previous October. Hitler’s
paranoia stretched now to doubts about the capsules. He had shown
his alsatian bitch Blondi more affection in recent years than any
human being, probably including even Eva Braun. Now, as the end
approached, he had the poison tested on Blondi. Professor Werner
Haase was summoned from his duties in the nearby public air-raid
shelter beneath the New Reich Chancellery building nearby. Shortly
before the afternoon briefing on 29 April, aided by Hitler’s dog-
attendant, Sergeant Fritz Tornow, he forced open the dog’s jaws and
crushed the prussic acid capsule with a pair of pliers. The dog
slumped in an instant motionless to the ground. Hitler was not
present. However, he entered the room immediately afterwards. He
glanced for a few seconds at the dead dog. Then, his face like a
mask, he left without saying anything and shut himself in his room.
The bunker community had by this time dwindled still further.
Three emissaries — Bormann’s adjutant, SS-Standartenfitthrer
Wilhelm Zander, Hitler’s army adjutant Major Willi Johannmeier,

and Acting Press Chief Heinz Lorenz — had left that morning as
couriers on a perilous, and fruitless, mission to deliver copies of the
Testament to Donitz, Schorner, and the Nazi Party’s headquarters,
the ‘Brown House’ in Munich. By this time, normal telephone
communications had finally broken down, though naval and party
telegraph wires remained usable, with difficulty, to the end. But
dispatch runners brought reports that Soviet troops had brought up
their lines to a mere 400-500 metres from the Reich Chancellery.
The Berlin Commandant General Weidling informed Hitler that they
had begun a concentrated attack on the ‘Citadel’; resistance could
only be sustained for a short time. Three young officers, Major
Bernd von Loringhoven (Krebs’s adjutant), his friend Gerhard Boldt
(the Chief of Staff's orderly), and Lieutenant-Colonel Rudolf Weifs
(General Burgdorf’s adjutant), decided to try a last chance to escape
from their predestined tomb. They put it to Krebs that they should
break out in the attempt to reach Wenck. He agreed; so, following
the midday conference, did Hitler. As he shook hands wearily with
them, he said: ‘Give my regards to Wenck. Tell him to hurry or it
will be too late.’

That afternoon, Below too, who had been a member of Hitler’s
‘household’ since 1937, decided to try his luck. He asked if Hitler
would permit him to attempt to get through to the west. Hitler
readily agreed. Below left late that night, bearing a letter from
Hitler to Keitel which, from Below’s memory of it (the letter itself
was destroyed), repeated his praise for the navy, his attribution of
blame for the Luftwaffe’s failure exclusively to Goring, and his
condemnation of the General Staff together with the disloyalty and
betrayal which had for so long undermined his efforts. He could not
believe, he said, that the sacrifices of the German people had been
in vain. The aim had still to be the winning of territory in the East.

By this time, Hitler had learned that Mussolini had been captured
and executed by Italian partisans. Whether he was told the details —
how Mussolini had been hanged upside down in a square in Milan,
together with his mistress Clara Petacci, and stoned by a mob — is
uncertain. If he did learn the full gory tale, it could have done no

more than confirm his anxiety to take his own life before it was too
late, and to prevent his body from being seized by his enemies.
During the late-evening briefing, General Weidling had told Hitler
that the Russians would reach the Reich Chancellery no later than 1
May. There was little time remaining.

Nevertheless, Hitler undertook one last attempt to ascertain the
possibilities of relief, even at this late hour. With nothing heard
throughout the day of Wenck’s progress (or lack of it), he cabled
five questions to Jodl in the most recent OKW headquarters in
Dobbin at eleven o’clock that evening, asking in the tersest fashion
where Wenck’s spearheads were, when the attack would come,
where the 9th Army was, where Holste’s troops were, and when
their attack might be expected.

Keitel’s reply arrived shortly before 3 a.m. on 30 April: Wenck’s
army was still engaged south of the Schwielow Lake, outside
Potsdam, and unable to continue its attack on Berlin. The 9th Army
was encircled. The Korps Holste had been forced on to the
defensive. Keitel added, below the report: ‘Attacks on Berlin not
advanced anywhere.’ It was now plain beyond any equivocation:
there would be no relief of the Reich capital.

Hitler had, in fact, already given up. Before 2 a.m. he had said
goodbye to a gathering of around twenty to twenty-five servants
and guards. He mentioned Himmler’s treachery and told them that
he had decided to take his own life rather than be captured by the
Russians and put on show like an exhibit in a museum. He shook
hands with each of them, thanked them for their service, released
them from their oath to him, and hoped they would find their way
to the British or Americans rather than fall into Russian hands. He
then went through the same farewell ceremony with the two
doctors, Haase and Schenck, and the nurses and assistants, who had
served in the emergency hospital established below the New Reich
Chancellery.

At dawn, Soviet artillery opened up intensive bombardment of
the Reich Chancellery and neighbouring buildings. Hitler inquired
soon afterwards of the commandant of the ‘Citadel’, SS-

Brigadeftihrer Mohnke, how long he could hold out. He was told for
one to two days at most. In the last briefing, in the late morning,
Berlin’s commandant, General Weidling, was even more pessimistic.
Munition was fast running out; air-supplies had dried up and any
replenishment was out of the question; morale was at rock-bottom;
the fighting was now in a very small area of the city. The battle for
Berlin would in all probability, he concluded, be over that evening.
After a long silence, Hitler, in a tired voice, asked Mohnke’s view.
The ‘Citadel’ commandant concurred. Hitler wearily levered himself
out of his chair. Weidling pressed him for a decision on whether, in
the event of a total ammunitions failure, the remaining troops could
attempt to break out. Hitler spoke briefly with Krebs, then gave
permission — which he confirmed in writing — for a break-out to be
attempted in small numbers. As before, he rejected emphatically a
capitulation of the capital.

He sent for Bormann. It was by now around noon. He told him
the time had come; he would shoot himself that afternoon. Eva
Braun would also commit suicide. Their bodies were to be burnt. He
then summoned his personal adjutant, SS-Sturmbannfiihrer Otto
Gunsche. He did not want to be put on display in some waxworks in
Moscow, he said. He commissioned Gtinsche with making the
arrangements for the cremation, and for ensuring that it was carried
out according to his instructions. Hitler was calm and collected.
Giinsche, less calm, immediately rushed to telephone Hitler’s
chauffeur, Erich Kempka, to obtain as much petrol as was available.
He impressed upon him the urgency. The Soviets could reach the
Chancellery garden at any time.

Hitler took lunch as usual around 1 p.m. with his secretaries,
Traudl Junge and Gerda Christian, and his dietician Fraulein
Manziarly. Eva Braun was not present. Hitler was composed, giving
no hint that his death was imminent. Some time after the meal had
ended, Giinsche told the secretaries that Hitler wished to say
farewell to them. They joined Martin Bormann, Joseph and Magda
Goebbels, General Burgdorf and General Krebs, and others from the
‘inner circle’ of the bunker community. Looking more stooped than

ever, Hitler, dressed as usual in his uniform jacket and black
trousers, appeared alongside Eva Braun, who was wearing a blue
dress with white trimmings. He held out his hand to each of them,
muttered a few words, and, within a few minutes and without
further formalities, returned to his study.

Eva Braun went into Magda Goebbels’s room with her. Magda, on
whom three days earlier Hitler had pinned his own Golden Party
Badge — a signal token of esteem for one of his most fervent
admirers — was in a tearful state. She was conscious not only that
this was the end for the Fuhrer she revered but that within hours
she would be taking, as well as her own life, the lives of her six
children, still playing happily in the corridors of the bunker. Highly
agitated, Magda immediately reappeared, asking Giinsche if she
could speak to Hitler again. Hitler somewhat begrudgingly agreed
and went in to see Magda. It was said that she begged him a last
time to leave Berlin. The response was predictable and unemotional.
Inside a minute, Hitler had retreated behind the doors of his study
for the last time. Eva Braun followed him almost immediately. It
was shortly before half-past three.

For the next few minutes, Goebbels, Bormann, Axmann (who had
arrived too late to say his own farewell to Hitler) and the remaining
members of the bunker community waited. Giinsche stood on guard
outside Hitler’s room. The only noise was the drone of the diesel
ventilator. In the upstairs part of the bunker, Traudl Junge chatted
with the Goebbels children as they ate their lunch.

After waiting ten minutes or so, still without a sound from
Hitler’s room, Linge took the initiative. He took Bormann with him
and cautiously opened the door. In the cramped study, Hitler and
Eva Braun sat alongside each other on the small sofa. Eva Braun
was slumped to Hitler’s left. A strong whiff of bitter almonds — the
distinctive smell of prussic acid — drifted up from her body. Hitler’s
head drooped lifelessly. Blood dripped from a bullet-hole in his
right temple. His 7.65mm. Walther pistol lay by his foot.

1. Adolf Hitler (top row, centre) in his Leonding school photo, 1899.

ee a

2. Klara Hitler, the mother of Adolf.

3. Alois Hitler, Adolf’s father.

4. Karl Lueger, Biirgermeister of Vienna, admired by Hitler for his

antisemitic agitation.

5. August Kubizek, Hitler’s boyhood friend in Linz and Vienna.

6. The crowd in Odeonsplatz, Munich, greeting the proclamation of
war, 2 August 1914. Hitler circled.

7. Hitler (right) with fellow dispatch messengers Ernst Schmidt and
Anton Bachmann and his dog ‘Fox!’ at Fournes, April 1915.

8. German soldiers in a trench on the Western Front during a lull in
the fighting.

9. Armed members of the KPD from the Neuhausen district of
Munich during a ‘Red Army’ parade in the city, 22 April 1919.

10. Counter-revolutionary Freikorps troops entering Munich,

beginning of May 1919.

11. Anton Drexler, founder in 1919 of the DAP (German Workers’
Party).

12. Ernst ROhm, the ‘machine-gun king’, whose access to weapons
and contacts in the Bavarian army were important to Hitler in the
early 1920s.

Deutfhe Arbeiter-Partei (D. A. ay

Ortsgruppe Minden

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13. Hitler’s DAP membership card, contradicting his claim to be the

seventh member of the party.

14. Hitler speaking on the Marsfeld in Munich at the first Party
Rally of the NSDAP, 28 January 1923.

HITLER SPRICHT!

(1/0 APART UT

15. ‘Hitler speaks!’ NSDAP mass meeting, Zirkus Krone, Munich,
1923.

16. Paramilitary organizations during the church service at the

‘German Day’ in Nuremberg, 2 September 1923.

17. Alfred Rosenberg, Hitler, and Friedrich Weber (centre, behind
Hitler, Christian Weber) during the march-past of the SA and other
paramilitary groups to mark the laying of the war memorial

foundation stone, Munich, 4 November 1923.

18. The putsch: armed SA men (centre, holding the old Reich flag,
Heinrich Himmler, right, with fur collar, Ernst Rohm) manning a
barricade outside the War Ministry in Ludwigstrafse, Munich, 9
November 1923.

19. The putsch: armed putschists from the area around Munich, 9
November 1923.

20. Defendants at the trial of the putschists: left to right, Heinz
Pernet, Friedrich Weber, Wilhelm Frick, Hermann Kriebel, Erich
Ludendorff, Adolf Hitler, Wilhelm Briickner, Ernst Rohm, Robert
Wagner.

21. Hitler posing for a photograph, hurriedly taken by Hoffman
because of the cold, at the gate to the town of Landsberg am Lech,

immediately after his release from imprisonment.

22. Hitler in Landsberg, postcard, 1924.

23. The image: Hitler in Bavarian costume (rejected), 1925/6.

24. The image: Hitler in a raincoat (accepted), 1925/6.

f, 1925 (rejected, from a

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25. The image: Hitler with his alsatian

broken plate).

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26. The Party Rally, Weimar, 3-4 July 1926: Hitler, standing in a
car in light-coloured raincoat, taking the march-past of the SA,
whose banner carries the slogan: ‘Death to Marxism’. Immediately to
Hitler’s right is Wilhelm Frick and, beneath him, facing the camera,

Julius Streicher.

27. The Party Rally, Nuremberg, 21 August 1927: left to right, Julius
Streicher, Georg Hallermann, Franz von Pfeffer, Rudolf Hefs, Adolf
Hitler, Ulrich Graf.

28. Hitler in SA uniform (rejected), 1928/9.

ADOLF HITLER
Magen jaitiausence vergehen. so wird man nie ven Heldeatem
reden dlirfen, ohne des ba Heeres des Weltkrieges au
gedenken.

29. Hitler in rhetorical pose. Postcard from August 1927. The
caption reads: ‘In the passing of thousands of years, heroism will
never be spoken of without remembering the German army of the

world war’.

30. Hitler speaking to the NSDAP leadership, Munich, 30 August
1928. Left to right: Alfred Rosenberg, Walter Buch, Franz Xaver
Schwarz, Hitler, Gregor Strasser, Heinrich Himmler. Sitting by the

door, hands clasped, is Julius Streicher: to his left is Robert Ley.

31. Geli Raubal and Hitler, c. 1930.

32. Eva Braun in Heinrich Hoffmann’s studio, early 1930s.

33. Reich President Paul von Hindenburg.

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34. Reich Chancellor Heinrich Briining (left) with Benito Mussolini,
Rome, August 1931.

35. Reich Chancellor Franz von Papen (front, right), with State
Secretary Dr Otto Meissner, at the annual celebration of the Reich
Constitution, 11 August 1932. Behind von Papen is Reich Minister of
the Interior Wilhelm Freiherr von Gayl, who, that very day, put
forward proposals to make Weimar’s liberal constitution distinctly

more authoritarian.

36. Gregor Strasser and Joseph Goebbels watching the SA parade
past Hitler, Braunschweig, 18 October 1931.

37. Ernst Thalmann, leader of the KPD, at a rally of the ‘Red Front’

during the growing crisis of Weimar democracy, c. 1930.

des Kapifalismus
Hatioualsoialiten —¥

38. Nazi election poster, 1932, directed against the SPD and the
Jews. The slogan reads: ‘Marxism is the Guardian Angel of

Capitalism. Vote National Socialist, List 1’.

39. Candidate placards for the presidential election, Berlin, April
1932.

40. Discussion at Neudeck, the home of Reich President Paul von
Hindenburg, 1932. Left to right: Reich Chancellor Franz von Papen,
State Secretary Otto Meissner (back to camera), Reich Minister of
the Interior Wilhelm von Gayl, Hindenburg, and Reichswehr

Minister Kurt von Schleicher.

41. Reich Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher speaking in the Berlin

Sportpalast, 15 January 1933.

42. A photo taken of Hitler in the Kaiserhof Hotel, Berlin, in January
1933, just before his appointment as Chancellor, to test how he

looked in evening dress.

43. The ‘Day of Potsdam’, 21 March 1933: a deferential Hitler bows

to Reich President von Hindenburg.

44. SA violence against Communists in Chemnitz, March 1933.

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45. The boycott of Jewish doctors, April 1933. The stickers read:

‘Take note: Jew. Visiting Forbidden’.

46. An elderly Jew being taken into custody by police in Berlin,
1934.

47. Hindenburg and Hitler on their way to the rally in Berlin’s
Lustgarten on the ‘Day of National Labour’, 1 May 1933. The

following day, the trades union movement was destroyed.

48. Hitler with Ernst Rohm at a parade of the SA in summer 1933, as

problems with the SA began to emerge.

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49. The Fiihrer cult: a postcard, designed by Hans von Norden in
1933, showing Hitler in a direct line from Frederick the Great, Otto
von Bismarck, and Paul von Hindenburg. The caption reads: ‘What
the King conquered, the Prince shaped, the Field Marshal defended,

the Soldier saved and united’.

50. The Fiihrer cult: ‘The Fiihrer as animal-lover’, postcard, 1934.

51. Hitler justifying the ‘Rohm purge’ to the Reichstag, 13 July

1934.

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52. Hitler, Professor Leonhard Gall, and architect Albert Speer
inspecting the half-built ‘House of German Art’ in Munich. Undated

cigarette-card, c. 1935.

53. Hitler with young Bavarians. Behind him (right) in Bavarian
costume, Hitler-Youth leader Baldur von Schirach. Undated

photograph.

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54. The Mercedes-Benz showroom at Lenbachplatz, Munich, April
1935.

55. Hitler during a visit to the Ruhr in 1935, accompanied (left to
right) by his valet, Karl Krause, and the leading industrialists Albert
Vogler, Fritz Thyssen (his photo a later insertion?), and Walter

Borbet, all important executives of the United Steel Works.

“Hitler

in feinen Bergen

56. ‘Hitler in his Mountains’: cover of a Heinrich Hoffmann

publication of 1935, featuring 88 photographs of the Fihrer in

picturesque settings.

57. The swearing-in of new recruits at the Feldherrnhalle in

Odeonsplatz, Munich, on the anniversary of the putsch, 7 November

1935.

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58. German troops entering the demilitarized Rhineland across the
Hohenzollern Bridge in Cologne, 7 March 1936.

59. Hitler, September 1936, portrayed wearing a suit and not the

usual party uniform.

60. Hitler discussing plans in 1936 for new administrative buildings
in Weimar with his up-and-coming favourite architect, Albert Speer.
Fritz Sauckel, Reich Governor and Gauleiter of Thuringia, is on
Hitler’s right.

62. British Royalty at the Berghof. Hitler meets the Duke and

Duchess of Windsor on 22 October 1937, during the visit to Germany

of the ex-King Edward VIII and his wife, the former Mrs Wallis

Simpson.

63. Field-Marshal Werner von Blomberg in 1937. He was to be
dismissed from office as War Minister the following January on

account of a scandal concerning his wife.

64. Colonel-General Werner Freiherr von Fritsch, Commander-in-
Chief of the Army until his dismissal, in the wake of the Blomberg
scandal, at the beginning of February 1938 on trumped-up charges of

homosexuality.

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65. Hitler addresses the exultant masses in Vienna’s Heldenplatz on
15 March 1938, following the Anschluf.

66. The Axis: flanked by Mussolini and King Victor-Emmanuel III,
Hitler views a parade of troops in Rome during his visit to Italy in
May 1938.

67. Hitler is cheered by crowds of admirers in Florence.

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68. Part of the exhibition ‘The Eternal Jew’, which opened in Munich
on 8 November 1937 and ran until 31 January 1938, purporting to
show the ‘typical external features’ of Jews and to demonstrate their
supposedly Asiatic characteristics. The exhibition drew 412,300
visitors in all — over 5,000 per day. It helped to promote the sharp
growth of antisemitic violence in Munich and elsewhere in Germany
during 1938.

69. ‘Jews in Berlin’, from the exhibition ‘The Eternal Jew’, which
opened in the Reich capital on 12 November 1938. This was two
days after Goebbels had unleashed a nation-wide orgy of violence in
which Jewish property was destroyed throughout Germany, leading
to mass arrests of Jews and their exclusion from business and

commerce.

70. The synagogue in Fasanenstrafse, Berlin, burns after Nazi
stormstroopers set it on fire during the pogrom of 9-10 November
1938.

71. The Jewish Community building in Kassel on the morning after
the pogrom. Beds, papers, and furniture, thrown out by the Nazi
perpetrators, lie on the street. Onlookers and police watch as two

people attempt to clear up.

72. Passers-by — some smiling, some looking in apparent
bewilderment — outside a demolished and looted Jewish shop in
Berlin. The amount of glass smashed by Nazi mobs gave rise to the

sarcastic appellation ‘Reichskristallnacht’.

73. A model family? Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels,
his wife Magda, and their children Helga, Hilde, and baby Helmut,

posing for the camera in 1936.

74. Goebbels, broadcasting to the Germans on the eve of Hitler’s
fiftieth birthday, 20 April 1939. The Propaganda Minister’s marriage
had been under severe strain during the previous months on account
of his affair with the Czech actress Lida Baarova, but for prestige
reasons Hitler had insisted that Goebbels and his wife did not

separate.

75. An unusual photograph, taken about 1938, of Eva Braun, Hitler’s
companion since 1932 - a relationship kept secret from the German
public until 1945.

76. With Hitler looking on, General Wilhelm Keitel, chief of the
High Command of the Wehrmacht, greets the British Prime Minister,
Neville Chamberlain, at the Berghof on 15 September 1938, during

the Sudeten crisis.

77. German troops crossing the Charles Bridge in Prague in March
1939, a few days after Hitler had forced the Czech government to

agree to the imposition of a German Protectorate over the country.

78. Hitler’s imposing ‘study’ in the Reich Chancellery, used more to

impress visitors than for work.

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79. Pomp and Circumstance: Hermann Goring addresses Hitler
during a ceremonial occasion — probably on Hitler’s birthday, 20
April 1939 — in the New Reich Chancellery, designed by Albert Speer
and completed in early 1939.

80. ‘The Fihrer’s birthday’: Hitler is amused, on his forty-ninth

birthday, 20 April 1938, when Ferdinand Porsche presents him with
a model of the Volkswagen, pointing out that the engine is in the
boot. None of the 336,000 Germans who ordered and paid for a car
partly or in full ever took delivery of a Volkswagen. The vehicles

were produced during the war exclusively for military purposes.

81. ‘The Fiihrer’s birthday’: Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, gives

Hitler his present — a valuable equestrian portrait of Frederick the
Great by Adolf von Menzel -on the Ftihrer’s fiftieth birthday, 20
April 1939, watched by Sepp Dietrich (centre), commander of the SS-
Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, and (extreme right) Karl Wolff, chief of

Himmler’s personal staff.

82. Hitler, in evening dress, walks with Winifred Wagner past
cheering crowds during the last Bayreuth Festival before the war, in
July 1939.

83. Molotov signs the Non-Aggression Pact of the Soviet Union with
Germany in the early hours of 24 August 1939, watched by (left to
right) Red Army Chief of Staff Marshal Boris S. Shaposhnikov,
adjutant to Ribbentrop Richard Schulze, a smug-looking German

Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, and Joseph Stalin.

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84. Hitler in his temporary field-headquarters during the Polish
campaign, together with his Wehrmacht adjutants, (from left to right)
Captain Nicolaus von Below (Luftwaffe), Captain Gerhard Engel
(Army), and Colonel Rudolf Schmundt (chief adjutant). Martin

Bormann is on Hitler’s left.

85. Hitler reviewing troops in Warsaw on 5 October 1939 at the

conclusion of the victory over Poland.

86. Hitler during his address to the Party’s ‘Old Guard’ in the

Burgerbraukeller in Munich on 8 November 1939. Only minutes
after he had left the building, a time-bomb placed by a Swabian
joiner, Georg Elser, exploded close to where he had been speaking,

killing eight and injuring more than sixty of those present.

87. Arthur Greiser, the fanatical Reich Governor and Gauleiter of
Reichsgau Wartheland, the annexed part of western Poland, at the

celebration for the ‘liberation’ of the area on 2 October 1939.

88. Albert Forster, Gauleiter of Danzig-West Prussia, a rival to

Greiser in the brutal attempt to ‘germanize’ the annexed parts of

89. (left and right) An ecstatic Hitler at his headquarters

‘Wolfsschlucht’ (Wolf’s Gorge), near Briily-de-Pesche in Belgium, on
hearing the news on 17 June 1940 that France had requested an
armistice. Walther Hewel, Ribbentrop’s liaison at Fiihrer

Headquarters, is on Hitler’s right.

90. Hitler visiting emplacements on the Maginot Line in Alsace,

during his short stay at his headquarters ‘Tannenberg’, near
Freudenstadt in the Black Forest, on 30 June 1940.

91. Hitler in Freudenstadt on 5 July 1940, the last day he was based

at “Tannenberg’.

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92. An immense crowd gathered on Wilhelmplatz in Berlin on 6 July
1940, wildly cheering the conquering hero on Hitler’s return from
the triumph over France. Goring is beside Hitler on the balcony of
the Reich Chancellery.

93. Hitler bids farewell to Franco following their talks at Hendaye,

on the borders of France and Spain, on 23 October 1940. The smiles

concealed the dissatisfaction felt by each of the dictators at the

outcome of the talks.

94. Hitler meets the French head of state, Marshal Pétain, at
Montoire on 24 October 1940 for talks which produced little

tangible result.

95. Ribbentrop talking to Molotov, the Soviet Foreign Minister, at a

reception in the Hotel Kaiserhof during the latter’s visit to Berlin,
12-14 November 1940. The tough talks with Molotov confirmed to
Hitler that he was right to plan for an attack on the Soviet Union in
1941.

96. Hitler and the Japanese Foreign Minister, Matsuoka, in the Reich

Chancellery in Berlin on 27 March 1941. Foreign Ministry official
and interpreter Dr Paul Schmidt, who compiled the record of the
meeting, is on the left. Matsuoka remained non-committal about
Japanese intentions. Hitler had earlier that day given directions to

his military leaders about the invasion of Yugoslavia.

97. Hitler at his headquarters at Monichkirchen near Wiener

Neustadt in mid-April 1941, during the Balkan campaign, talking to
General Alfred Jodl (left), head of the Wehrmacht Operations Staff.

Nicolaus von Below, his Luftwaffe adjutant, is behind Hitler.

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98. A thoughtful Hitler, accompanied by head of the Wehrmacht

High Command Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, travelling by train on
30 June 1941 to the headquarters of Army High Command in
Angerburg, not far from his own new Fiihrer Headquarters at the

Wolf’s Lair, near Rastenburg, in East Prussia.

99. An Anti-Bolshevik Poster: ‘Europe’s Victory is Your Prosperity’.
With Britain destroyed, the mailed fist of Nazi Germany smashes

Stalin’s Bolshevism.

100. Field-Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch (right), the weak Com-
mander-in-Chief of the Army between February 1938 and his
dismissal in December 1941, in a briefing with General Franz Halder,
Chief of the General Staff from 1938 to 1942.

101. Field-Marshal Keitel discussing military matters with Hitler at

the Wolf’s Lair soon after the invasion of the Soviet Union.

102. Reichsfiihrer-SS and Chief of the German Police Heinrich
Himmler (left) alongside his right-hand man SS-Obergruppenfiihrer
Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Security Head Office. With
Hitler’s authorization, the steps were taken under their aegis in

1941-2 to implement the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’.

NALEN-FINANZJUDEN’
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103. ‘Should the international Jewish financiers succeed once again in
plunging the nations into a world war, the result will be not the victory of
Jews but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe’ — Adolf Hitler.
The ‘prophecy’ that Hitler had announced to the Reichstag on 30
January 1939. The poster was produced in September 1941 as a
‘Slogan of the week’ by the central office of the Nazi Party’s
Propaganda Department and distributed to party branches

throughout the Reich.

104. (top) Hitler salutes the coffin of Reinhard Heydrich, who had
been assassinated by Czech patriots flown in from Britain, at the
state funeral of the Security Police Chief in the Mosaic Salon of the

New Reich Chancellery in Berlin on 9 June 1942.

105. (inset) Hitler comforts Heydrich’s sons at the state funeral.
Privately, he was critical of Heydrich’s carelessness in regard to his
own security. Other Nazi leaders in the photo are, left to right: Kurt
Daluege (head of the Ordnungspolizei); Bernhard Rust (Reich

Minister for Education); Alfred Rosenberg (Reich Minister for the
Occupied Eastern Territories); Viktor Lutze (SA Chief of Staff);
Baldur von Schirach (Reich Governor and Gauleiter of Vienna);
Robert Ley (Nazi Party Organization Leader and head of the German
Labour Front); Himmler; Wilhelm Frick (Reich Minister of the
Interior); and Goring.

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106. Hitler addresses 12,000 officers and officer-candidates in the
Sportpalast in Berlin on 28 September 1942.

107. Some of the assembled young officers cheering Hitler at the

meeting.

108. Field-Marshal Fedor von Bock in 1942, as Commander-in-Chief
of Army Group South. During the second half of 1941 he had
commanded Army Group Centre, which had spearheaded the thrust
to Moscow. Though increasingly critical of Hitler’s military

leadership, he remained a loyalist.

109. Field-Marshal Erich von Manstein, possibly Hitler’s most gifted
military commander. Despite his growing differences with Hitler, he
refused to join the conspiracy against him, stating: ‘Prussian field-

marshals do not mutiny.’

110. Hitler speaking on ‘Heroes’ Memorial Day’, 15 March 1942, in

the Ehrenhof (‘courtyard of honour’) of the Armoury on Unter den

Linden in Berlin.

111. The Eastern Front, July 1942. Motorized troops drive away

from a blazing Russian village they have destroyed.

112. Hitler’s ‘clients’: entertaining the heads of satellite states. Hitler
greets the Croatian head of state, Dr Ante Pavelic, in the Wolf’s Lair
on 27 April 1943.

113. Hitler on his way to discussions with the Romanian leader,
Marshal Antonescu (centre), at Fiihrer Headquarters on 11 February
1942. Hitler’s interpreter Paul Schmidt is on the left.

114. Hitler greets King Boris III of Bulgaria in the Wolf’s Lair on 24
March 1942. Little over a week after a subsequent tense visit, on 15
August 1943, King Boris died suddenly of a heart attack, giving rise

to rumours abroad that Hitler had had him poisoned.

115. The turn of the Slovakian President, Monsignor Dr Josef Tiso,
to visit Hitler on 22 April 1943 at the restored baroque palace of

Klessheim, near Salzburg.

116. Hitler greets the Finnish leader Marshal Mannerheim at the
Wolf’s Lair on 27 June 1942. Keitel is in the background.

117. Admiral Horthy, Hungarian head of state, speaks with (left to

right) Ribbentrop, Keitel, and Martin Bormann during a visit to the
Wolf’s Lair on 8-10 September 1941. Later visits, as the fortunes of

war deteriorated, proved less harmonious than this one.

118. The Over-extended Front. By 1942 demands for men and
equipment across a vast range of fronts and conditions had generated
just the strategic incoherence Hitler had always feared. Norway: A
‘Do 24 flying boat is deposited on land by the crane of a salvage

vessel, to be towed to a repair hangar.

119. The Over-extended Front. Leningrad: A huge cannon, mounted
on a train, fires on the besieged city. The gun weighed 145 tons, had

a barrel 16.4 metres long, and had a range of 46.6 kilometres.

el > 3
Pagn sal Et ~~

120. The Over-extended Front. Libya: German tanks rolling along

the front in Cyrenaica.

121. The Over-extended Front. Bosnia: An expedition to hunt down

partisans.

122. An exhausted German soldier on the Eastern Front.

123. Hitler viewing the Wehrmacht parade after laying a wreath at

the cenotaph on Unter den Linden on ‘Heroes’ Memorial Day’, 21
March 1943. Behind Hitler (left to right) are Goring, Keitel,

Commander-in-Chief of the Navy Karl Donitz, and Himmler. Shortly
beforehand, a planned attempt to kill Hitler by opponents from
within Army Group Centre had had to be aborted when the dictator’s

usual timetable on the day was altered without notice.

124. Hitler is saluted by the Party’s ‘Old Guard’ in the
Lowenbraukeller in Munich on 8 November 1943, the twentieth
anniversary of the Beerhall Putsch. Goring is to Hitler’s right. It was
to be the last time that Hitler would appear in person at this

symbolic ritual, a high point in the Nazi calendar.

125. Martin Bormann, head of the Party Chancellery (following the
flight of Rudolf Hef$ to Scotland in May 1941). From the beginning
of the war onwards he was invariably at Hitler’s side, and in April
1943 was officially appointed Secretary to the Fithrer. This
proximity, together with his control of the party, gave him great

power.

126. Hitler and Goebbels, still capable of raising a smile despite
military disasters and mounting domestic problems, photographed
during a walk on the Obersalzberg above Berchtesgaden in June
1943.

127. The Eastern Front in spring and autumn. A German vehicle

bogged down in heavy mud.

128. The Eastern Front in winter. Tanks and armoured vehicles,

unusable in the conditions, had to be dug in at strategic points to

secure them against Soviet attacks.

129. The Eastern Front in summer. Limitless space. A Waffen-SS unit

treks across seemingly unending fields.

130. The ‘Final Solution’. French Jews being deported in 1942.
Frightened faces peer out from behind the barbed-wire covering the

slats of the railway-wagon.

~
oe

131. The ‘Final Solution’. Polish Jews forced to dig their own grave,
1942.

132. The ‘Final Solution’. Incinerators at Majdanek with skeletons of
camp-prisoners murdered on the approach of the Red Army and

liberation of the camp on 27 July 1944.

133. Hitler and Himmler take a wintry walk on the Obersalzberg in
March 1944.

134. The ‘White Rose’ resistance group of Munich students.
Christoph Probst (left) with Sophie and Hans Scholl in July 1942. On

22 February the following year, they were sentenced to death and

beheaded on the same day for distributing leaflets in Munich
University, in the wake of the disaster at Stalingrad, condemning the

inhumanity of the Nazi regime.

135. The brilliant tank commander Heinz Guderian. Though he
clearly recognized that Hitler was leading Germany to catastrophe,
he condemned the attempt to assassinate him on 20 July 1944. A day
later, Guderian was appointed Chief of the General Staff, retaining

the position until his dismissal on 28 March 1945.

136. General Ludwig Beck, who, following his resignation — because
of Hitler’s insistence on risking war over Czechoslovakia — as Chief
of the General Staff in 1938, became a central figure in the
conservative resistance, committing suicide on 20 July 1944 after

the failure of the bomb-plot.

137. Colonel Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, the driving-force
behind the conspiracy to kill Hitler on 20 July 1944, who took upon
himself the responsibility both for carrying out the assassination in
the Wolf’s Lair and for directing the intended coup d’état in Berlin.
On its failure, he was arrested and shot by a firing-squad late that

night.

138. Major-General Henning von Tresckow, one of the most
courageous figures in the resistance, the inspiration of several plans,
hatched within Army Group Centre, to kill Hitler in 1943.
Stauffenberg regarded Tresckow as his mentor. This is one of the last
photographs of him, taken in 1944. He committed suicide on 21 July

on the Eastern Front on learning of the failure of the bomb-plot.

139. Hitler, looking shaken, just after the assassination attempt on
20 July 1944.

140. Hitler’s trousers, shredded by the bomb-blast.

141. Hitler greets Mussolini at Fithrer Headquarters — the last time
they would meet — some three hours after Stauffenberg’s bomb had
exploded on 20 July 1944. Hitler had to shake hands with his left
hand because his right arm had been slightly injured in the blast.

142. Grand-Admiral Donitz professes the loyalty of the navy ina

broadcast shortly after midnight on 21 July 1944, just after Hitler
and Goring had spoken to the German people. Listening to Donitz
are Bormann (left, next to Hitler) and Jodl (on Hitler’s right, with
bandaged head).

143. An ageing Hitler, pictured at the Berghof in 1944.

144. Wonder-Weapons: a V1 flying-bomb is taken to its launch-pad.

146. Wonder-Weapons: An American soldier stands alongside a Me

262 on the advance into Germany in April 1945. Hitler had for a
long time insisted on having the jet-fighter designed as a bomber.

When finally deployed as a fighter, it was far too late to be effective.

147. Scraping the barrel. Ill-equipped men of the ‘Volkssturm’ — the

people’s militia established by Hitler on 25 September 1944,
ordering all able-bodied men between 16 and 60 to take up arms —

pictured during a swearing-in ceremony in Berlin in December 1944.

148. The last ‘Heroes’ Memorial Day’, 11 March 1945. Hitler did not
appear, leaving it to Goring (flanked by Donitz on his left, and Keitel

on his right) to lay the wreath at the cenotaph on Unter den Linden.

149. Women and children fleeing as the Red Army attacks Danzig in
March 1945.

150. Fantasy: In February 1945, with the Red Army within striking
distance of Berlin, Hitler ponders the model of the intended postwar
rebuilding of his hometown of Linz, designed for him by his architect

Hermann Giesler.

vt P

=> “S
F ; * :
si° 'S - os aw.

151. Reality: Hitler, with his adjutant Julius Schaub, standing in the

ruins of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin in March 1945, a few weeks

before his suicide.

Epilogue

Hitler was dead. Only the last obsequies remained. They would not
detain the inhabitants of the bunker for long. The man who, living,
had dominated their existence to the last was now merely a corpse
to be disposed of as rapidly as possible. With the Russians at the
portals of the Reich Chancellery, the bunker inmates had thoughts
other than their dead leader on their minds.

Within minutes of the deaths being established, the bodies of
Adolf Hitler and his wife of a day-and-a-half, Eva Braun, were
wrapped in the blankets that Heinz Linge, Hitler’s valet, had quickly
fetched. The corpses were then lifted from the sofa and carried
through the bunker, up twenty-five feet or so of stairs, and into the
garden of the Reich Chancellery. Linge, helped by three SS guards,
brought out the remains of Hitler, head covered by the blanket, his
lower legs protruding. Martin Bormann carried Eva Braun’s body
into the corridor, where Erich Kempka, Hitler’s chauffeur, relieved
him of his burden. Otto Ginsche, Hitler’s personal adjutant, and
commissioned with overseeing the burning of the bodies, then took
over on the stairs and carried Eva Braun up into the garden. He laid
the bodies side by side, Eva Braun to Hitler’s right, on a piece of
flat, open, sandy ground only about three metres from the door
down to the bunker. It was impossible to look around for any more
suitable spot. Even this location, close to the bunker door, was
extremely hazardous, since an unceasing rain of shells from the
Soviet barrage continued to bombard the whole area, including the
garden itself. General Hans Krebs, Hitler’s last Chief of the General
Staff, Wilhelm Burgdorf, his Wehrmacht adjutant, Joseph Goebbels,
newly appointed Chancellor of what was left of the Reich, and
Martin Bormann, now designated Party Minister, had followed the

small cortége and joined the extraordinary funeral party witnessing
the macabre scene.

A good store of petrol had been gathered in the bunker in
readiness. Kempka had himself provided, at Giinsche’s request, as
much as 200 litres. More was stored in the bunker’s machine-room.
The petrol was now swiftly poured over the bodies. Nonetheless, as
the hail of shells continued, setting the funeral pyre alight with the
matches Goebbels supplied proved difficult. Giinsche was about to
try with a grenade, when Linge managed to find some paper to
make a torch. Bormann was finally able to get it burning, and either
he or Linge hurled it on to the pyre, immediately retreating to the
safety of the doorway. Someone rapidly closed the bunker door,
leaving open only a small crevice, through which a ball of fire was
seen to erupt around the petrol-soaked bodies. Arms briefly raised
in a final ‘Heil Hitler’ salute, the tiny funeral party hurriedly
departed underground, away from the danger of the exploding
shells. As the flames consumed the bodies in a suitably infernal
setting, the end of the leader whose presence had a mere few years
earlier electrified millions was witnessed by not a single one even
of his closest followers.

Neither Linge nor Gtinsche, the two men entrusted by Hitler with
the disposal of the bodies, returned to ensure that the task was
complete. One of the guards in the Chancellery garden, Hermann
Karnau, later testified (though, like a number of the witnesses in the
bunker, he gave contradictory versions at different times) that,
when he revisited the cremation site, the bodies had been reduced
to little more than ashes, which collapsed when he touched them
with his foot. Another guard, Erich Mansfeld, recalled that he had
viewed the scene together with Karnau around 6 p.m. Karnau had
shouted to him that it was all over. When they went across
together, they found two charcoaled, shrivelled, unrecognizable
bodies. Gunsche himself told of commissioning, around half an hour
after returning from the cremation, two SS men from the Fuhrer
Escort Squad (Fiihrerbegleitkommando), Hauptsturmftihrer Ewald
Lindloff and Obersturmfihrer Hans Reisser, with ensuring that the

remains of the bodies were buried. Lindloff later reported that he
had carried out the order. The bodies, he said, had been already
thoroughly burnt and were in a ‘shocking state’, torn open —
Giinsche presumed — in the heavy bombardment of the garden.
Reisser’s involvement was not needed. Giinsche told him, an hour
and a half after giving him the order, that Lindloff had already
carried it out. It was by this time no later than 6.30 p.m. on 30
April.

There had been little left of Hitler and Eva Braun for Lindloff to
dispose of. Their few mortal remains joined those of numerous
other unidentifiable bodies (or parts of them), some from the
hospital below the New Reich Chancellery, which had rapidly been
thrown into bomb-craters in the vicinity of the bunker exit during
the previous days. The intense bombardment which continued for a
further twenty-four hours or so played its own part in destroying
and scattering the human remains strewn around the Chancellery
garden.

When the Soviet victors arrived there on 2 May they immediately
began a vigorous search for the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun.
Nine days later, they showed the dental technician Fritz Echtmann,
who had worked for Hitler’s dentist, Dr Johann Hugo Blaschke,
since 1938, part of a jaw-bone and two dental bridges. He was able
to identify from his records one of the bridges as that of Hitler, the
other as Eva Braun’s. The lower jaw-bone, too, was Hitler’s. These
earthly remains of the once all-powerful ruler of Germany were
subsequently taken to Moscow and kept in a cigar-box. Part of a
skull with a bullet-hole in it, thought to be Hitler’s, was discovered
in 1946 and also found its way to Moscow. The other presumed
remains of Hitler and Eva Braun — what, exactly, the Soviets found
is still unclear — were deposited initially in an unmarked grave in a
forest far to the west of Berlin, reburied in 1946 in a plot of land in
Magdeburg, then finally exhumed and burnt in 1970.

The bunker inmates were finally free to think of their own survival.
Even while the bodies still burned in the Chancellery garden above,
they had forgotten their vows of self-immolation alongside their
leader and were agreeing to do what he had always and explicitly
ruled out: seek a last-minute arrangement with the Soviet Union. An
emissary was sent out under a white flag to try to engineer a
meeting of General Krebs (who, as a former military attaché in
Moscow, had the advantage of speaking fluent Russian) with
Marshal Zhukov. At 10 p.m. that evening, Krebs went over the
Soviet lines bearing a letter from Goebbels and Bormann.

It was an anxious night for those incarcerated in the bunker. And
when Krebs returned around 6 a.m. next morning it was only to
report that the Soviet side insisted upon unconditional surrender
and demanded a declaration to that effect by 4 p.m. that afternoon,
1 May.

This was the end. It was time for final preparations — on the sole
remaining principle of save what can be saved. At 10.53 a.m., a
telegram for Donitz arrived in Plon: ‘Testament in force. I’ll come to
you as quickly as possible. Until then, in my view, hold back from
publication. Bormann.’ Earlier that morning, more than nine hours
after the grotesque scene in the Chancellery garden, the Grand-
Admiral, still believing Hitler was alive, had telegraphed an
expression of his continued unconditional loyalty to the bunker.
Only now did he realize that Hitler was dead. This was confirmed in
a further telegram — the last to leave the bunker — dictated by
Goebbels and arriving at Plon at 3.18 p.m. that afternoon. Neither
the Wehrmacht nor the German people were as yet aware of Hitler’s
death. When they were finally told, seven hours later, in a
broadcast at 10.26 p.m. that night, it was, typically, with a double
distortion of the truth: that Hitler had died that afternoon — it was
the previous day — and that his death had taken place in combat ‘at
his post in the Reich Chancellery, while fighting to his last breath
against Bolshevism’. In his proclamation to the Wehrmacht, Donitz
spoke of the Fihrer’s ‘heroic death’. The Wehrmacht’s report stated
that he had fallen ‘at the head of the heroic defenders of the Reich

capital’. The delay in informing Donitz had plainly been to allow
Bormann and Goebbels the final opportunity of a negotiated
surrender to the Red Army without consulting the new head of
state. The untruth relayed by Donitz to the Wehrmacht and German
people was to prevent a predictable response by the troops, had
they been aware of Hitler’s suicide, that the Fithrer had deserted
them at the last. This was, in fact, precisely the message which
General Helmuth Weidling, the German commander in Berlin,
conveyed to his troops when ordering them, in the early hours of 2
May, to cease fighting. ‘On 30.4.45 the Fuhrer took his own life and
thereby abandoned those who had sworn him loyalty,’ ran the
order. ‘At the Fithrer’s command you believe that you must still
fight for Berlin, although the lack of heavy weaponry and
munitions, and the overall situation shows the struggle to be
pointless ... In agreement with the High Command of the Soviet
troops, I therefore demand you to end the fighting immediately.’

By then, the drama in the bunker was finally over. Most of those
still entombed below the Reich Chancellery had spent the afternoon
and evening of 1 May planning their break-out. Goebbels was not
among them. Along with his wife, Magda, he was now making
arrangements for their own suicides — and for taking the lives of
their six children. In the early evening, Magda summoned Helmut
Gustav Kunz, adjutant to the head doctor in the SS medical
administration in the Reich Chancellery, and asked him to give each
of the children — Helga, Hilde, Helmut, Holde, Hedda, and Heide,
aged between twelve and four — a shot of morphine. It was about
8.40 p.m. when Kunz carried out the request. Once they had fallen
into a drugged sleep, Dr Ludwig Stumpfegger, Hitler’s own
physician at the end, crushed a phial of prussic acid in the mouth of
each of the children.

Later that evening, as Wilhelm Mohnke, commandant of the
‘Citadel’, gave orders for the mass break-out from the bunker,
Goebbels instructed his adjutant, Ginther Schwagermann, to take
care of the burning of his and Magda’s bodies. He gave him the
silver-framed signed photograph of Hitler that for so many years

had stood on his desk as a memento. Then he and his wife, after
saying their brief farewells, climbed the stairs to the Chancellery
garden, and bit on the prussic acid capsules. An SS orderly fired two
shots into the bodies to make sure. Far less petrol was available for
the unceremonious cremation than had been saved for burning the
bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun. Soviet troops had little difficulty in
identifying the corpses when they entered the Chancellery garden
next day.

Krebs, Burgdorf, and Franz Schadle, head of Hitler’s escort squad,
also chose to end their lives in the bunker before the Russians
arrived. The rest of the company sought their luck late that evening
in the mass escape, undertaken in groups. The underground railway
tunnel brought them to Friedrichstrafge station, a few hundred yards
to the north of the ruined Reich Chancellery. But once on the
surface, in the burning hell of Berlin, with shells falling all around,
confusion took over. The groups found themselves split up in the
chaos. Individuals took what chances they could. A few, including
the secretaries Gerda Christian, Traudl Junge, and Else Krtiger,
managed, remarkably, to make their way through to the west.
Most, among them Otto Giinsche and Heinz Linge, fell into Soviet
hands and years of misery and maltreatment in Moscow prisons.
Most of the others were killed seeking a route to safety, or took the
last decision left to them. Prominent among the latter were Hitler’s
constant right hand during the war years, Martin Bormann, and his
doctor, Ludwig Stumpfegger. Both had given up their hopes of
escape and, rather than fall into Soviet hands, had swallowed poison
in the early hours of 2 May 1945 in Berlin’s Invalidenstrafte.

Ill

Outside Berlin, the winding-up orders on the Third Reich were
meanwhile in the process of being served. However, they were
carried out by the new Donitz regime — based in Flensburg in the
north of Schleswig-Holstein — with great reluctance, and only under
the evident compulsion of the hopeless military situation. At the end

of the First World War, disastrous though the defeat had been, it
had proved possible to save the existence of the Reich and the
German army. The basis for the hopes of national rebirth had been
laid. Donitz held to the illusion that this much might be achieved a
second time. Even at this late hour, he was hoping through the offer
of partial capitulation to the west to avoid total and unconditional
surrender on all fronts, at the same time sustaining, with western
backing, the German Reich to form, alongside the western powers,
a common front against Bolshevism. For this, he needed to gain
time — also to allow withdrawal to the west of as many as possible
of the Wehrmacht troops still engaged in bitter fighting against the
Red Army. He was ready to sanction, therefore, the German
capitulation in northern Italy on 2 May, which had already been
agreed between Himmler’s former right-hand man Karl Wolff and
OSS chief Allen Dulles on the day before Hitler’s suicide. He also
reluctantly conceded on 4 May a further partial capitulation
involving German troops in north-west Germany, Holland, and
Denmark. In the south, where the Americans reached Munich on the
day of Hitler’s death, Innsbruck on 3 May, and Linz — Hitler’s home
town — four days later, Kesselring negotiated the surrender of the
German divisions in the northern Alps on the 5th and in Austria on 7
May. Donitz did not, however, include in the partial capitulation the
German troops further east, still fighting in Yugoslavia.

The Grand Admiral’s hopes of rescuing the remnants of Hitler’s
Reich were visible in his choice of cabinet. Though he rejected
Himmler’s overtures for inclusion, and turned his back, too, on
Ribbentrop, he retained several members of Hitler’s cabinet, among
them Albert Speer, while foreign affairs and the direction of the
cabinet were placed in the hands of the long-standing finance
minister Schwerin von Krosigk, who, it was presumed, would
appear unsullied by the worst crimes of Nazism. He made no
changes in the High Command of the Wehrmacht. Hitler’s
mainstays, Keitel and Jodl, were left in post. The Nazi Party was
neither banned nor dissolved. Pictures of Hitler still adorned the
walls of government offices in Flensburg. One of the few

concessions that Donitz made was the reintroduction of the military
salute in the Wehrmacht to replace the ‘Heil Hitler’ greeting. But
military courts continued to hand out death-sentences even as the
last rites on the Third Reich were being pronounced.

The tactics employed by Donitz were at least successful in
enabling an estimated 1.8 million German soldiers to avoid Soviet
captivity by surrendering to the western Allies — though at a high
cost of continuing bloodshed and suffering before the fighting could
be finally terminated. While the eastern front had since 1941 been
the main theatre of war, under a third of the 10 million or so
German prisoners-of-war fell into Soviet hands. But Donitz’s
intentions of a one-sided, partial capitulation to win the West at this
late stage to the defence against Bolshevism cut little ice with Allied
leaders. When his envoy (and successor as Commander-in-Chief of
the Navy) Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg journeyed with a
delegation to Rheims, Eisenhower’s headquarters, hoping to seal an
agreement with the western Allies amounting to a capitulation to
the West, but not to the Soviet Union, Eisenhower was having none
of it. He insisted on a full and unconditional surrender on all fronts.
Accordingly, on 6 May, Donitz sent Jodl to Rheims on seemingly
the same mission — to persuade the West to accept German
surrender, but to avoid total capitulation — though this time with
powers to agree to a complete capitulation (following final
authorization from Flensburg) and instructions to gain maximum
time — at least four days — in order to bring back the largest German
fighting unit still in combat, Army Group Centre, across American
lines. Eisenhower remained unmoved. He insisted on the
capitulation being signed that very day, 6 May, with effect from
midnight on 9 May, and threatened a renewal of air-raids if the
agreement were not forthcoming. Jodl was given half an hour to
think it over. After difficulties in communication with Flensburg,
Donitz, faced with no alternative, eventually conceded his
authorization in the early hours. At 2.41 a.m. on 7 May, in the
presence of representatives of all four of the Allied powers, the

capitulation was signed, stipulating a complete ending of all
German military engagements by the end of the following day.

The document to which the signatures were appended was,
however, a shortened version of the original text of surrender,
agreed by all the Allies. It was, in fact, regarded by the OKW
leadership as ‘not final’, and to be replaced by ‘a general
capitulation treaty’ still to be signed. Meanwhile, the order had
gone out to bring back as many troops and as speedily as possible to
the west for surrender to the British and Americans. At Stalin’s
insistence, Allied representatives assembled once more, on 9 May,
just after midnight, this time at Karlshorst on the outskirts of Berlin,
headquarters of Marshal Zhukov, to sign the full document of
capitulation. Since the terms agreed at Rheims had already come
into effect a few minutes earlier, the document was dated 8 May.
Keitel, Friedeburg, and Colonel-General Hans-Jurgen Stumpff
(representing the Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe, Ritter von
Greim) signed from the German side. Zhukov, the British Air-
Marshal Arthur W. Tedder (representing Eisenhower), the French
General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, and the US General Carl Spaatz
signed for the Allies.

The last Wehrmacht report, on 9 May 1945, retained a tone of
pride, speaking of ‘the unique achievement of front and homeland’
which would ‘in a later, just verdict of history find its final
appreciation’. These words, hollow for millions, followed the
declaration: ‘On command of the Grand Admiral the Wehrmacht has
stopped the fight which had become hopeless. The struggle lasting
almost six years is accordingly at an end.’

Hitler’s war was over. The reckoning was about to begin.

Many of those bearing heaviest responsibility, after Hitler, for the
terrible suffering of the previous years and the deep pall of sorrow
left behind escaped full retribution. Suicide, Hitler had always said,
was easy. Some of his leading henchmen now followed his example.

Heinrich Himmler, the embodiment of police terror, captured by the
British under false identity and wearing the uniform of a
Wehrmacht sergeant, crunched a phial of potassium cyanide in an
interrogation centre near Luneburg on 23 May as soon as his true
identity had been established. Robert Ley, the stridently antisemitic
head of the German Labour Front, taken by American troops in the
mountains of the Tyrol, strangled himself in the lavatory of his
prison cell at Nuremberg on 24 October while awaiting trial.
Arrested by US forces near Berchtesgaden on 9 May 1945, Hermann
Goring, for so long Hitler’s designated successor until his abrupt
dismissal in the last days of the Third Reich, also committed suicide
— cheating the hangman awaiting his presence next day on the late
evening of 15 October 1946 after being convicted on all charges,
including crimes against humanity, at the International Military
Tribunal in Nuremberg.

Others among the regime’s leaders, unwilling or unable to end
their own lives, suffered the fate imposed upon them by the
Tribunal and were hanged at Nuremberg. Convicted for crimes
against humanity — in all but one case war crimes, and in some
instances conspiracy to commit or actual commission of crimes
against peace — the warmongering former Foreign Minister Joachim
von Ribbentrop; chief of the High Command of the Wehrmacht
Wilhelm Keitel; head of the Operations Department of the
Wehrmacht and Hitler’s chief military adviser Alfred Jodl; Nazi
ideological guru and Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern
Territories Alfred Rosenberg; Reich Minister of the Interior (until
his removal from office in 1943) Wilhelm Frick; Hitler’s key man in
Vienna at the time of the Anschlufg and later Reich Commissar in
the Netherlands Arthur Sey{$-Inquart; Labour Plenipotentiary Fritz
Sauckel, who presided over the slave-labour programme; Heydrich’s
fearsome successor as head of the RSHA Ernst Kaltenbrunner;
Governor-General of Poland and leading Nazi lawyer Hans Frank;
and the former Gauleiter of Franconia, leading Jew-baiter Julius
Streicher were executed on 16 October 1946. Few mourned them.

Albert Speer, the Armaments Minister whose hands were barely
less dirty than Sauckel’s in the exploitation of forced labour, was
one of those fortunate to escape the hangman’s noose. Like the last
head of state Admiral Donitz, Economics Minister Walther Funk,
Foreign Minister (until his replacement by Ribbentrop in 1938)
Konstantin von Neurath, head of the navy Erich Raeder, long-time
Hitler Youth leader and Gauleiter of Vienna Baldur von Schirach,
and (until his flight to Scotland in 1941) deputy head of the Nazi
Party Rudolf Hels, Speer was given a long prison sentence. Funk,
Neurath, and Raeder were released early on health grounds. Donitz,
Speer, and Schirach left prison each after serving the full sentence —
in Speer’s case to become a celebrity, best-selling author, and pundit
on the Third Reich with a belated guilt complex as his trademark.
Hefg was to commit suicide in 1987, still serving a life-sentence in
Spandau prison in Berlin.

Among second-ranking Nazis implicated in the regime’s most
heinous crimes, the most notorious, the manager of the ‘Final
Solution’ Adolf Eichmann, was to be dramatically abducted from
Argentina by Israeli agents, tried in Jerusalem, and hanged in 1962.
The commandant of Auschwitz Rudolf Hofs, the butcher of the
Warsaw ghetto Jtirgen Stroop, the terror of the Poles in the
Warthegau Gauleiter Arthur Greiser, and his scarcely less fanatical
counterpart in Danzig-West Prussia Albert Forster were all hanged
at earlier dates after trials in Poland. The Poles proved more
humanitarian than their previous tormentors in commuting, on
account of his poor health, the death-sentence on the notably (even
by Nazi standards) cruel and brutal former Gauleiter of East Prussia
Erich Koch to a term of life-imprisonment.

Many implicated in crimes against humanity escaped lightly.
Hinrich Lohse, former Reich Commissar in the Baltic, was released
in 1951 on grounds of ill-health after serving only three years of a
ten-year sentence. He died peacefully in his home town in 1964.
Wilhelm Koppe, SS leader in the Warthegau and alongside Greiser
the instigator of Chelmno extermination camp, where over 150,000
Jews lost their lives, was able to prosper under a pseudonym as the

director of a chocolate factory in Bonn until the 1960s. When
discovered and arraigned for his part in mass murder in Poland he
was deemed unfit to stand trial, eventually dying in his bed in 1975.
Countless others, who in ‘working towards the Ftthrer’ had
exercised positions of great power, often determining life or death
(including doctors implicated in the ‘euthanasia action’) and lining
their own pockets at the same time through boundless corruption
and ruthless careerism, were able wholly or in part to avoid serious
retribution for their actions — in some cases building successful post-
war careers for themselves.

Few of those forced to account for their actions under Hitler
showed remorse or contrition, let alone guilt. With scant exception,
they showed themselves, when called to book, incapable of
acknowledging their own contribution to the remorseless slide into
barbarism during the Nazi era. Alongside the inevitable lies,
distortions, and excuses often went, it seems, a psychological block
on recognizing responsibility for their actions. It amounted to a self-
deception that mirrored the total collapse of their value-system and
the demolition of the idealized image of Hitler to which they had
clung for so many years — which, indeed, had usually underpinned
or at least given justification for their motivation. They had been
content for years to see their power, careers, ambitions, aspirations
depend solely on Hitler. Now, it was in a perverse sense logical that
their own plight would be attributed solely to what they saw as
Hitler’s lunacy and criminality. From being the revered leader
whose utopian vision they had eagerly followed, Hitler was now the
scapegoat who had betrayed their trust and seduced them through
the brilliance of his rhetoric into becoming helpless accomplices to
his barbaric plans.

Such a psychology applied not merely to many of those most
heavily incriminated in the Nazi experiment to determine who
should inhabit this planet. Countless ordinary Germans were now
prepared to find an explanation for or defence of their own actions
(or lack of action) in the alleged seductive powers of Hitler - a
leader promising salvation but in the end delivering damnation.

Alternatively, they looked to a level of totalitarian terror that had
left them with no alternative but to follow orders of which they
disapproved. Both responses were wide of the mark.

Hitler’s regime, as we have had ample cause to acknowledge, was
— certainly for most of its twelve-year duration — no narrowly based
tyranny imposing its will upon the hostile masses of the population.
And, until the ‘running amok’ of the last phase of the war, the terror
— at least within Germany — had been specifically targeted at
defined racial and political enemies, not random and arbitrary,
while the level of at least partial consensus in all reaches of society
had been extensive. Generalizations about the mentalities and
behaviour of millions of Germans in the Nazi era are bound to be of
limited application — apart, perhaps, from the generalization that,
for the great mass of the population, the figurative colours to look
for are less likely to be stark black and white than varying and
chequered shades of grey. Even so, it remains the case that,
collectively, the inhabitants of a highly modern, sophisticated,
pluralistic society which, following a lost war, was experiencing
deep-seated national humiliation, economic bankruptcy, acute
social, political, and ideological polarization, and a generally
perceived complete failure of a discredited political system, had
been prepared in increasing numbers to place their trust in the
chiliastic vision of a self-professed political saviour. Once, as can
now more easily be seen, a series of relatively cheap and easy
(though in reality exceedingly dangerous) national triumphs had
been achieved, still further vast numbers were prepared to swallow
their doubts and to believe in the destiny of their great leader.
Moreover, these triumphs, however much they were portrayed by
propaganda as attributable to the achievements of one man, had
been brought about not only with huge mass acclaim, but also with
a very high level of support from almost all of the non-Nazi élite-
groups — business, industry, civil service, above all the armed forces
— which controlled practically every avenue of power outside the
upper echelons of the Nazi Movement itself. Though the consensus
was in many respects a shallow one, resting upon differing degrees

of backing for the various strands of the overall ideological vision
which Hitler embodied, it offered nevertheless until the middle of
the war an extremely wide and potent platform of support for Hitler
to build upon and exploit.

The rise from the depths of national degradation to the heights of
national greatness seemed for so many (as propaganda never ceased
to trumpet) to be a near-miracle — a work of redemption brought
about by the unique genius of the Fuhrer. Hitler’s power was able
thereby to draw on strong elements of pseudo-religious belief
translated into the mysticism of national salvation and rebirth —
emanating in part no doubt from declining institutional religion and
from the psychologically needed substitution in some quarters for
the quasi-religious associations with the monarchy — which also
compensated in some ways for the many negative aspects of
everyday life under Nazi rule. Even to the very end there were
intelligent individuals prepared to exempt Hitler from knowledge of
the atrocities committed in Poland and Russia — and to attach blame
instead to Himmler. The Fuhrer cult, accepted not only by millions
of believers but pandered to in their own interests by all in
positions of authority and influence, even if they were often
inwardly critical or sceptical, enabled Hitler’s power to shake off all
constraints and become absolute. By the time realization dawned
that the road to riches was proving the road to ruin, the
personalized rule of the leader was out of control. Hitler was by
now — though this had not always been so — incapable of being
checked by the splintered parts of an increasingly fragmented
regime bound together largely by the commitment to the ruler
himself and, increasingly, fear of the alternative: Bolshevism. The
road to perdition lay open, but — other than the courageous
attempts by small groups or individuals which ultimately failed
through bad luck even more than through bad planning — there was
by now little alternative but to follow this road.

The price to be paid — by the German people, above all by the
regime’s untold numbers of victims inside and outside Germany —
was beyond calculation. The material price was immense. Writing

to The Times on 12 November 1945, the left-wing British Jewish
publisher Victor Gollancz described his impressions in Dtisseldorf: ‘I
am never likely to forget the unspeakable wickedness of which the
Nazis were guilty. But when I see the swollen bodies and living
skeletons in hospitals here and elsewhere ... then I think, not of
Germans, but of men and women. I am sure I should have the same
feelings if I were in Greece or Poland. But I happen to be in
Germany, and write of what I see here.’ The moral price was, if
anything, even more immeasurable. Decades would not fully erase
the simple but compelling sentiment painted in huge letters at the
scene of Hitler’s annual celebration of the 1923 putsch, the
Feldherrnhalle in Munich, in May 1945: ‘I am ashamed to be a
German.’ ‘Europe has never known such a calamity to her
civilization and nobody can say when she will begin to recover from
its effects,’ was the telling and at the same time prophetic comment
of one British newspaper, the Manchester Guardian, only three days
after the suicide in the bunker. The trauma which was Hitler’s
lasting legacy was only just beginning.

Never in history has such ruination — physical and moral — been
associated with the name of one man. That the ruination had far
deeper roots and far more profound causes than the aims and
actions of this one man has been evident in the preceding chapters.
That the previously unprobed depths of inhumanity plumbed by the
Nazi regime could draw upon wide-ranging complicity at all levels
of society has been equally apparent. But Hitler’s name justifiably
stands for all time as that of the chief instigator of the most
profound collapse of civilization in modern times. The extreme form
of personal rule which an ill-educated beerhall demagogue and
racist bigot, a narcissistic, megalomaniac, self-styled national
saviour, was allowed to acquire and exercise in a modern,
economically advanced, and cultured land known for its

philosophers and poets was absolutely decisive in the terrible
unfolding of events in those fateful twelve years.

Hitler was the main author of a war leaving over 50 million dead
and millions more grieving their lost ones and trying to put their
shattered lives together again. Hitler was the chief inspiration of a
genocide the like of which the world had never known, rightly to be
viewed in coming times as a defining episode of the twentieth
century. The Reich whose glory he had sought lay at the end
wrecked, its remnants to be divided among the victorious and
occupying powers. The arch-enemy, Bolshevism, stood in the Reich
capital itself and presided over half of Europe. Even the German
people, whose survival he had said was the very reason for his
political fight, had proved ultimately dispensable to him.

In the event, the German people he was prepared to see damned
alongside him proved capable of surviving even a Hitler. Beyond
the repairing of broken lives and broken homes in broken towns
and cities, the searing moral imprint of Hitler’s era would remain.
Gradually, nevertheless, a new society, resting in time, mercifully,
on new values, would emerge from the ruins of the old. For in its
maelstrom of destruction Hitler’s rule had also conclusively
demonstrated the utter bankruptcy of the hyper-nationalistic and
racist world-power ambitions (and the social and political structures
that upheld them) that had prevailed in Germany over the previous
half a century and twice taken Europe and the wider world into
calamitous war.

The old Germany was gone with Hitler. The Germany which had
produced Adolf Hitler, had seen its future in his vision, had so
readily served him, and had shared in his hubris, had also to share
his nemesis.

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INDEX

1st Belorussian Front 888

Ist Panzer Army 796

1st Ukrainian Front 888

Ist US Army 879, 893

2nd Army 661-2, 665, 818

2nd Belorussian Front 888

2nd Panzer Army 665

3rd Belorussian Front 888

3rd Panzer Army 656, 811

3rd US Army 884, 914

3rd White Russian Front 879

4th Army 662, 811, 890

4th Panzer Army 656, 734, 735, 920

5th Army (Soviet) 641

5th Panzer Army 881, 883

6th Army 672, 723, 729, 733-5, 737-9

6th Panzer Army 881, 883, 888, 889, 913

7th Army 804

7th Army (French) 732

8th Army 411

8th Army (British) 717, 727, 730, 772

8th Army (Italian) 736

9th Army 724, 756, 811, 914-15, 920, 927-8, 930, 934, 935, 939-
40, 941, 953

10th Panzer Division 826

11th Army 673, 710, 724
12th Army 608, 927, 930, 931, 934, 946
17th Army 672

18th Army 602

18th Artillery Division 826
18th Infantry Division 429
39th Mountain Corps 724
48th Panzer Corps 733
56th Panzer Corps 934
57th Panzer Corps 735
Aachen 879, 882

Abruzzi 774

Abwehr (military intelligence):
Canaris heads 418, 520, 825
Department II 433
opposition to H 535-6, 541-2, 544, 820, 821, 825, 846

Abyssinia 338-9, 349, 350-51, 352, 368-9, 370, 402
Adam, Wilhelm 425, 431

ADGB (Allgemeiner Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund) 288
Adlerhorst (‘Eagle’s Eyrie’; Fuhrer Headquarters) 882, 888, 894
Admiral Scheer (cruiser) 384

Aegean Sea 585, 604—5

Africa 714, 716

Afrika Corps 736, 762

‘Aktion Reinhard’ 688, 775

Alamein, El 727, 730

Alarich, Operation 768

Albrecht, Alwin-Broder 922

Alexandra, Princess 117

Alexandria 718

Algeria 562, 580

Algiers 730

Allgemeiner Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund (ADGB) 288
Almeria 384

Alsace 58, 578, 884

Altenberg, Jacob 34

Altmark incident 552

Alvensleben, Ludolf von 519

Amann, Max:
denounces Kurt Liidecke 114
and H’s refounding of NSDAP 163
and H’s ‘Second Book’ 183
imprisoned 140
in Munich in early 1920s 98
nominates H for promotion in First World War 54
and north German NSDAP 167
and party finances 187
and publication of Mein Kampf 147
and putsch attempt (1923) 131, 132
and Rohm’s murder 311
tours occupied France 561
Amerika (H’s special train) 327, 434, 478, 515-16, 544, 556, 607,
730
Amsterdam 765
Anglo-German Naval Agreement (1935) 337-8, 368-9, 486
Angriff, Der (newspaper) 217
Anhalt 227-8
Anschlu& 385, 386, 401-16, 420, 518
anti-Bolshevism 72, 73, 77, 92-3, 118, 148, 150-53, 369-70, 403,
566, 598, 602-3, 714

anti-capitalism 82, 92, 150, 189, 200, 223-4
anti-clericalism 161, 382, 661
Anti-Comintern Pact (1936) 369, 370-71
anti-Communism 231, 274, 599
anti-Marxism 118, 150-51, 178-9, 274
anti-socialism 106, 274

Antisemitenbund (Antisemitic League) 39

antisemitism:

anti-Jewish legislation 288, 321, 341, 342-9, 450-52, 462

in armed forces 464, 603

Crystal Night (9-10 November 1938) 449-50, 454, 457-60, 462-
7, 679

development of Nazi genocidal policy 459, 468-9, 524—7, 572-9,
594-8, 618, 668-99, 714-17, 775-7, 802-3, 969

following Anschlufs 415-16, 450

in Franconia 109-10

‘ideological cement’ of National Socialist Movement 285

‘Madagascar solution’ 453, 576-7, 593, 594, 677

November pogrom (1938) 455-69

and pan-Germanism 61

reined in during 1936 Olympics 359

Schonerer movement 22

in Vienna 24, 32, 37, 42-3, 415-16

and volkisch groups 82

waves of antisemitic violence: (1933) 273, 285, 302-3;

(1935) 339-41;

(1938) 383, 415, 449-51, 455-69

well-known tracts 91, 115 see also ‘Final Solution’; Hitler, Adolf,
antisemitism; Jews

Anton, Operation 733

Antonescu, Ion 584, 619, 758, 760, 867
Antwerp 866, 873, 879, 881

Apennines 773, 803, 863

‘Appeal of the Reich Government to the German People’ (1933)
264-5

appeasement 337, 407, 480, 488

Arabia 485

Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Vaterlandischen Kampfverbande (‘Working
Community of the Patriotic Fighting Associations’) 120

Arco-Valley, Graf Anton von 67, 132

Ardennes 554, 555, 557
offensive 873, 875, 879, 880-87, 892

Argentina 965
aristocracy 847
Army Group A 554, 555, 558

Army Group A (formerly Army Group South) 721-2, 723, 724, 725,
734, 736, 797

Army Group B (formerly Army Group South) 721, 722, 723, 727,
729, 734, 919

Army Group B (later Army Group Centre) 555, 601

Army Group Centre 602, 622, 635, 636-9, 640, 641, 642, 647, 651-
2, 656, 662-3, 665, 673, 723, 769, 787, 810, 811, 813, 819, 890,
927, 962

Army Group Don 734

Army Group North 637, 639, 640, 642, 651, 663, 666, 813, 814

Army Group North Ukraine 797, 813

Army Group South 591, 635, 640, 641, 651, 657, 712, 718, 772, 787

Army Group South Ukraine 797, 867

Army Group Vistula 891, 905, 913, 914, 944

Arnhem 866

Arnim, Hans-Jurgen von 757

Arrow Cross 876, 877-8

‘Aryan Paragraph’ 304

‘aryanization’ 368, 383, 450, 451, 463
aryans 148, 181, 342-3, 345, 347-8
Ashton-Gwatkin, Frank 433

assassination attempts:
November 1939 537, 544-7, 816
March 1943 821-2
December 1943-March 1944 827-8
July 1944 816-18, 828-53, 865, 875

Astakhov, Georgi 489

Astrakhan 722

asylums 533-5, 536, 548, 573, 688

Athens 608, 867

‘Atlantic Gap’ 761

Atlantic Ocean 645, 717, 743, 761, 861

Atlas (special train) 568

atomic bomb 874

Attolico, Bernardo 443-4, 503, 506

Auf gut Deutsch (In Plain German; antisemitic weekly) 95, 97

Aufbau-Ost (‘Build-Up in the East’) 568

Augsburg, Bavaria 101, 102, 610, 611

Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp 262,
469, 687-8, 697, 715, 776, 795, 878, 965

Austria:
agreement with Germany (July 1936) 369-70, 386, 402
Anschlufg 385, 386, 401-16, 420, 518
Austrian NSDAP 100, 317, 401, 404, 406, 409, 413
deportation of Jews 574, 575, 595, 684
German conflict with Italy over 350
German surrender in 961
Nazi waves of terror 298, 415-16, 450, 452

pan-German movement 22, 401
pro-Slav policies 47
putsch attempt (1934) 316-17
and Stresa Front 337
treatment of Jews after Anschlufg 415-16, 450
Austrian army 412
Austrian Question 385-6, 389-90, 403-6
Austrian SS 316-17
Austro-Hungarian empire 47
Autumn Mist, Operation 883-4
Avranches 861-2, 864
Axis:
formation of 370-71
ground laid for 350
H attempts to boost morale 729
Italy as junior partner 385, 560
leaders visit Berghof (April 1943) 757-8, 759-60
in North Africa 591, 717-18, 727, 730, 761
Spain and 579, 580-83, 592
term coined 370

Axis, Operation 771, 772
Axmann, Artur 923, 939, 955
Azores 761

Baarova, Lida 463, 492
Babarin, Evgeny 489
Babi-Yar massacre 675
Bach, Isidor 87

Backe, Herbert 950

Bad Godesberg 437, 440
Bad Harzburg 223

Bad Nauheim 882

Bad Reichenhall 568

Bad Wiessee 309-11

Baden 196, 278, 578

Badoglio, Pietro 767-8, 769, 770, 773

Bagration, Operation 810-11

Bakhmut river 655

Baku 722, 723

Balkan campaign (1941) 603-5, 607-10, 648

Baltic Germans 574, 575

Bamberg 71, 169, 170, 171-2, 180, 185, 730

banks 222, 451

Barandon, Paul 896

Baranov bridgehead 888

Barbarossa, Operation 587-91, 597-603, 609-10, 615-16, 618-21,
635-9, 645-8, 669, 674-5, 749

‘Basic Order’ (January 1940) 716

‘Basic Order’ (April 1945) 919

Bastogne 883-4

Bath 708

Battle of Britain 569-70

‘Battle of the Peoples’ 858

Baumann, Professor 75

Baur, Hans 375

bauxite 862

Bavaria:
anti-Prussian feeling 58, 90
Austrian Nazis in 408
ban on H’s public speaking 166, 184

Catholicism in 110, 133, 161, 162, 163, 205
Communists in 67, 70, 87, 279
conventional cabinet government restored (1924) 133
and the Deutscher Kampfbund 124
government in ‘exile’ (1919) 71
and H’s citizenship 226
monarchist government 98
Nazi seizure of power 278, 279-80, 283
paramilitary politics 106, 108, 121, 133
post-First World War political climate 77-8, 106, 108
religiosity 86
Revolution of 1918 66-71
ruling triumvirate (1923) 126-7, 128-9, 130, 131, 133
separatism 75
state elections (1932) 227-8
state of emergency (1923) 119, 125-6
tension with the Reich 122-3
Volkischer Block 132-3, 141-2, 144, 164, 190
Bavarian army:
H joins 52-3
post-First World War 68-9
Bavarian Peasants’ League (Bayerischer Bauernbund) 204
Bavarian People’s Party (BVP) 133, 290
Bavarian Political Police 278, 279, 290
Bavarian State Opera 709
Bayerische Reichswehr Gruppenkommando Nr.4 (‘Gruko’) 71-2
Bayerischer Bauernbund (Bavarian Peasants’ League) 204
Bayerischer Wald 924
Bayreuth 116, 166, 316, 361, 363, 365, 377, 490-91, 566-7
BBC 613, 772, 943
Bechstein, Carl 116, 187

Bechstein, Helene 116, 187

Beck, Jozef 475, 481-2, 505

Beck, Ludwig:
and the Anschlufs 408-9
assisted suicide 839, 840, 841, 845
Chief of the General Staff 334-5
and German expansionism 388, 390-91 418
illness 825
opposition to H 418, 425, 427-9, 536, 541, 819-20
and rearmament 352, 360
resignation 418, 423, 429-30
Beelitz 57, 62
Beethoven, Ludwig van 20, 701, 710, 799
‘Behaviour of German Soldiers in the East’ (order) 672
Belgium:
Allied liberation 866
Ardennes offensive 881
German occupation 557, 633, 713
neutrality 487
proposed trade 630
treaty with France (1921/35) 334

Belgrade 607, 608, 867
Bellini, Vincenzo 20
Belluno 767

Belorussia 635

Below, Nicolaus von:
and Allied advances in the west 862
and the Anschlufs 404
and battle for Stalingrad 737, 742
and Crystal Night 465
and death of vom Rath 456
and Dunkirk 558
in Fuhrer Bunker 933, 939, 941, 943, 952-3
in Fuhrer Headquarters 556, 786, 814, 880, 886-7

and Halder 726

honeymoon 374

and July 1944 assassination attempt 832-3

life at Berghof 803

military adjutant 375, 515

and Munich Agreement negotiations (1938) 442
and North African campaign 757

and opening of Eastern Front 590

passes Speer’s memorandum to H (March 1945) 911

Belzec extermination camp 688, 697, 715, 775
BeneS, Eduard 432, 433, 434, 436-8, 440-41, 477

Berchtesgaden:

Ciano visits (1936) 370

evacuation of H’s staff to (April 1945) 926

H holidays in 112, 123, 166, 176-7, 490, 491-2

Nazi leaders gather at (1932) 232;

(1936) 361, 363, 365

‘pilgrims’ at 907

transfer of Wehrmacht High Command to (April 1945) 930
Berdicev 623
Berger, Gottlob 715

Berghof, Obersalzberg:
Anschlufg negotiations at 404—5
Axis leaders’ visits (April 1943) 757-8
bombing of 907, 935
Chamberlain’s visit (1938) 434
converted from Haus Wachenfeld 177, 327
‘Eagle’s Nest’ (‘Tea House’) 494, 495
evacuation of H’s staff to (April 1945) 925-6
Goring’s house-arrest at 933
H’s last stay 814-15
H’s routine at 377, 378, 430-31, 491-2, 748, 781-2, 800, 803-4
military conference on Sudeten crisis 433
Mussolini’s visit (May 1942) 709-10

Polish crisis talks at (August 1939) 500
reinforcement of 792
Tea House xxxvii, 803

Berlin:

Alexanderplatz 938, 939

Allied bombing raids 570, 789-90, 893-4, 895, 900-901, 921

Anhalter-Bahnhof 562

Bendlerstrafge 834, 835, 839, 845-6

Brandenburg Gate 259, 837, 931, 947

Charlottenburg 534, 942

council elections (1929) 196-7

Dahlem 250, 296

during First World War 57-8, 61-2, 680

Friedrichstrafge station 960

Gatow aerodrome 926, 931, 935

Gorlitzer Bahnhof 478

Hotel Exzelsior 246

Invalidenstrafge 961

Kaiserhof Hotel 208, 247, 248, 255, 261, 294

Kroll Opera House 281

Lustgarten 179, 358, 714

Nationalgalerie 58

Nauen road 934

Olympic Games (1936) 348, 351, 358-9, 617

Plotzensee Prison 848

Potsdamer Platz 939, 946

Presidential Palace 234

‘racial cleansing’ policies 452, 454, 461-2, 578

Rangsdorf aerodrome 834

rebuilding plans 378, 379, 856

Red Army advance on 892, 904, 920-21, 923-5, 926-7, 928, 931,
934-42, 946, 952, 953-4

removal of Jews 595, 679-81, 685-7, 689, 691, 714, 759

Sportpalast 202, 227, 272, 296, 440-41, 570, 592, 649, 697, 728,
745, 789-90

State Opera House 799
Stettiner Bahnhof 515
synagogues destroyed 457
Tempelhof aerodrome 834, 935
Tiergarten 391

Unter den Linden 479, 799
Wannsee 690, 829
Wilhelmplatz 940
Wilhelmstrafse 942
Zeughaus 822

ZOO 926

Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra 710, 799
Berlin Treaty (1926) 331
Bernadotte, Count Folke 943-4, 945
Bernburg 534

Bessarabia 499, 584, 595, 619

Best, S. Payne 545

Best, Werner 775

Beuthen 237

Beyschlag, Rudolf 73-4

Bialystok 626, 627, 635

Bielefeld 678-9

Birmingham 479

Bismarck (battleship) 617-18

Bismarck, Prince Otto von 47, 112, 181, 283, 292, 294, 485
Gedanken und Erinnerungen (Thoughts and Memories) 145

Black Sea 642, 722, 797, 798
black-marketeering 705, 706
Blaschke, Johann Hugo 958
Blaskowitz, Johannes 524
Bleichroder (bank) 451

Blitz 570
Bloch, Eduard 5, 14, 15, 40

Blomberg, Werner von:
the Blomberg scandal (1938) 320, 391-3, 394, 396, 398-9, 404,
416, 422
and bombing of the Deutschland (1937) 384
death 399
Defence Minister 263
and emergency decree 276
in exile 393
and German expansionism 390, 391
and oath of unconditional loyalty to H 317-18
and rearmament 265-6, 267, 297-8, 299, 334-5, 352, 353, 360,
384, 387
recalled to join H’s cabinet 254
and restructuring of Wehrmacht 397, 398
and the SA 304-5, 308, 309, 313, 314
and Spanish Civil War 362-3
technical adviser at Geneva Disarmament Conference 254
Blondi (dog) 747, 781, 902, 903, 952
‘Blood Flag’ 173
‘Blood Law’ (1935) 344-6
Blticher (cruiser) 553
Blue, Operation 711, 717, 718, 719-21
Blum, Léon 364
Blumentritt, Guenther 667
Bliiml, Johann 71
Bobruisk 810, 811
Bochum 762

Bock, Fedor von:
and the Anschlufg$ 411
and ‘Commissar Order’ 602, 819

dismissal 720, 721
and drive for Moscow 642, 648, 651
invasion of Soviet Union 622-3, 636
and opening of Eastern Front 586, 590
and opening of Western Front 542
and opposition to H 542, 544, 642
spring/summer offensive (1942) 712, 718, 719-20, 721
and winter crisis on Eastern Front (1941-2) 653, 661, 662-3
Bodenschatz, Karl Heinrich 625
Boer War 7
Bohemia 387, 474, 475, 479
Boldt, Gerhard 952
Bolivia 162
Bolshevism:
fear of 258, 275, 332, 336
H’s crusade against 353, 361-4, 365-7, 381, 566, 571, 587, 593,
598-9, 620-21, 644
and H’s ‘world view’ 64, 148, 150-53, 155, 178
and Jews 66, 91, 146, 148, 150-52, 155, 363, 381, 593, 597-8,
672-3, 899, 907
‘national Bolshevism’ 168
planned liquidation of ‘Bolshevik intelligentsia’ 598-9
radical anti-capitalism 200 see also anti-Bolshevism
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 825
Bonn 892, 965
Bonnet, Georges 496
book-burning 292
Bor-Komorowski, Tadeusz 868
Border Police School, Pretzsch 618
Borgermoor internment camp 395
Boris III, King of Bulgaria 607, 758
Bormann, Albert 375

Bormann, Gerda 916

Bormann, Martin:
and badges for Jews 679
in ‘Committee of Three’ 750, 752
and conscription 854
and crushing of SA leadership 306
and development of genocidal programme 676
and disposal of H’s body 956-7
and euthanasia programmes 532
and ‘Final Solution’ 716
in Fiihrer Bunker 902, 906, 923, 925, 926, 932, 940, 941, 942-3,
946, 950, 954-5
and German surrender 958, 959
headquarters damaged 901
and Hefs affair (1941) 612, 614, 616
and ‘Jewish Question’ 340, 461, 593
and July 1944 assassination attempt 845-6
loyalty to H 900
and occupation of Poland 522
and plans for ‘New Order’ 633
and Polish crisis (1939) 511
preparation for peacetime Germany 916, 917-18
and radicalization of home front 705, 706, 749
relationship with H 375, 516-17
road construction 494
Secretary of the Fuhrer 752
strips Goring of rights of succession 933
suicide 961
and Total War Effort 856, 857, 859
witness at H’s wedding 948
in Wolf’s Lair 625, 786

Borneo 580
Borsig, Ernst von 117-18
Bose, Herbert von 312

Botrop 893

Bouhler, Philipp 167, 187, 528, 531-2, 533-4
Brabant 713

Brack, Viktor 532, 533, 534

Brahms, Johannes 20, 710

Brandenburg 534

Brandmayer, Balthasar 55-6, 57, 70

Brandt, Heinz 821

Brandt, Karl (H’s doctor):
and death of vom Rath 456
dismissal 870
and euthanasia programmes 528, 530, 532, 534
in wartime Fuhrer Headquarters 515, 556

Bratislava 476-7, 918

Brauchitsch, Walther von:
and the Anschlufg 41, 408, 410
at Wolf’s Lair 624, 650, 655
and deportation of Jews 597, 599
dismissal (December 1941) 663-5
and drive for Moscow 639, 640, 641, 642, 646, 647
H’s contempt for 646, 647
and invasion of Czechoslovakia 428-9
and Nazi atrocities in Poland 523, 524
and occupation of France 561
and opening of Eastern Front 586-7, 589-90, 591
and opening of Western Front 243, 539, 540-41, 542-4, 554-5,
558
and Operation Barbarossa 619, 635
and plans for putsch (November 1939) 540-41, 542-4
and Polish crisis (1939) 483, 502-3, 504
and proposed invasion of Britain 567
takes over from Fritsch as head of army 398, 422
weakness 647, 663-4

and winter crisis on Eastern Front (1941-2) 651-2, 655, 662-3

Braun, Eva:
at Obersalzberg 325, 378, 709, 800, 804
disposal of body 956-8
H keeps secret xxxvii, 378
and Heinrich Hoffmann 219, 378
her rooms in Reich Chancellery and Fuhrer Bunker 376, 901
as H’s only friend 747
last days in Fuhrer Bunker 922-3, 926, 929, 934, 942, 946
marriage to H 947-8
relationship with H 378, 952
suicide 932, 934, 954, 955

Braun, Gretl (later Fegelein) 491, 922, 942
Braun, Otto 231
Braunau am Inn 1, 2, 7, 411
Braunschweig 223, 226
Braunschweig, Operation 721-6
Brautigam, Otto 683-4
Bredow, Ferdinand von 312, 314
Breitenbuch, Eberhard von 828
Breker, Arno 561
Bremen 278, 728
Breslau 202, 205, 689, 891, 905, 950
Brest 704, 863, 864
Brest-Litovsk Treaty (1918) 152
Brest-Litowsk 623, 626
Brigade Epp 107
Britain:

Allied assault on Germany 892

Anglo-German Naval Agreement (1935) 337-8, 368-9, 486
and the Anschlufg 402, 407, 410

appeasement 337, 407, 480

Balkan campaign 608

Battle of Britain 569-70

bombing raids on 570, 708

boycott of German goods 286

Churchill comes to power 553

code-breaking 761

and Czechoslovakia 424, 426-7, 432-3, 439, 442-3, 479-80

D-Day landings 805-6

declares war on Germany (September 1939) 510

declares war on Japan (December 1941) 656-7

Dunkirk evacuation 557-9

First World War 57, 58

and Geneva Disarmament Conference 297-8

German hatred for 562

and German proposals for ending war 897-8, 899, 904

and German rearmament 333-4, 335, 336-8, 350-51

grant of US destroyers 570-71

Hefs’s mission to Scotland (May 1941) 610-17

Himmler’s overtures to 860, 899

H’s hostility to 151, 385

Jewish emigration to 463

landing in Italy 769, 771

naval power 471, 564, 733

North African campaign 591, 717-18, 727, 730, 731, 736, 761

obstacle to German expansionism 388, 390

and Poland 481-4, 486-7, 496-7, 500-505

potential alliance with Germany 169, 368-9, 385, 403, 421

proposed invasion of 562-5, 567-71, 592

rejects H’s ‘peace offer’ (12 October 1939) 517, 539-40, 617

rocket attacks on 791-2, 873, 881

Scandinavian campaign 552-3

Soviet Union as continental ally 642, 645

support against Russia 151, 153, 154

and Tripartite Pact (1940) 579-80 see also Royal Air Force; Royal
Navy

British Empire 151, 337, 388, 389, 424, 501, 556, 564, 580, 585
as model for H’s ‘New Order’ 629-30, 631, 633
British Expeditionary Force 557, 559, 608
British Secret Service 544-5, 547, 607, 613, 761
Brittany 861-2, 863-5
Brjansk 649
‘Brown House’, Munich 212, 213, 243, 293, 311, 444, 952
Brownshirts 202, 303
Bruckmann, Elsa 115, 116, 176, 187, 220, 376
Bruckmann, Hugo 115, 176, 187, 376
Bruckner, Anton 20, 710
Briickner, Wilhelm 126, 293, 310, 374, 375, 505, 515
Brtily-de-Pesche 559, 560
Brtining, Heinrich:
appointed Chancellor 199
banning of SA and SS 228-9
disillusionment with 223
dissolves Reichstag 199-200
emergency decree (1931) 217, 222
H’s loathing for 208-9

rejects coalition 208 resignation 229-30, 251
and SPD 206

Brussels 866, 873

Buchanan Castle, Scotland 612

Bucharest 581

Buchenwald concentration camp 459

Biichner, Bruno 177

Biichner, Frau (Obersalzberg landlady) 116, 177
Budapest 795, 876, 877-8, 889, 890

Bug river 499, 517, 521, 797

Buhler, Josef 697

Bukovina 584, 595, 619

Bulgaria 585, 586, 604, 862, 867

Bund Deutscher Madel (BDM; German Girls’ League) 413
Bund Oberland 120, 124, 134

Biirckel, Josef 413, 578

Burckhardt, Carl 494-5

Burg Werfenstein 28

Burgdorf, Wilhelm 875, 915, 922, 923, 928, 950, 954, 956, 960
Burgundy 540

Burma 580

Busch, Ernst 429, 671, 810-11, 813, 825

Bussche, Axel Freiherr von dem 827-8

Busse, Theodor 914-15, 920, 927, 934, 939-40
Buttmann, Rudolf 164

BVP (Bavarian People’s Party) 133, 290

Cairo 408
Cambrai 59

Canada:
Allied assault on Germany 892
D-Day landings 805

Canadian 1st Army 892

Canaris, Wilhelm:
heads Abwehr 418, 535, 825
house arrest 825
and H’s Czech policy 418, 433
and July plotters 846
and Nazi atrocities in Poland 520
and opposition to H 542, 544, 825

capitalism:

Feder’s ideas on 73
‘Jewish’ 73, 81, 92, 150
turned into adjunct of the state 270 see also anti-capitalism
Caputh 233
car industry 270-72, 633
Carinhall 924
Carlyle, Thomas 909, 918
cartoons 377
Casablanca Conference (January 1943) 754

‘Case Green’ (plan for war with Czechoslovakia) 418, 427-8, 431,
433

‘Case Otto’ (plan for annexation of Austria) 409
‘Case White’ (plan for war with Poland) 483-4, 502

‘Case X’ (plan for war with Russia, Czechoslovakia and Lithuania)
384

‘Case Yellow’ (plan for war in the West) 539, 554, 555

Caspian Sea 722, 725

Catholic Action 315

Catholic Church 282, 290, 295, 315, 332, 355, 373, 381, 463, 533

Catholic Ultramontanism 464
Catholics and Catholicism:
apprehensive about H 261
in Bavaria 110, 133, 161, 162, 163, 205
political Catholicism 133, 198, 205, 259, 277, 290, 295
in Saarland 332
and sterilization law 295
Caucasus 590-91, 641, 644, 650, 653, 654, 700, 710, 713, 721-3,
7oo, 775
Cavalero, Count Ugo 736
celibacy 22
Central Office for Jewish Emigration 464
Centre Party 86
Chamberlain, Houston Stewart 91, 115, 145
Chamberlain, Neville:
appointed Prime Minister 402
Birmingham speech (17 March 1939) 479-80, 481, 501
declares war on Germany 510
end of government 553
and German proposals for ending war 898
letter to H (22 August 1939) 500-501, 504
Munich Agreement (1938) 434-46
and Polish crisis (1939) 480, 482, 500-501
potential peace terms (1940) 565
reaction to German invasion of Czechoslovakia 479-80
rejection of ‘peace offer’ (12 October 1939) 517, 539-40

Chancellery of the Fuhrer of the NSDAP 531-2
‘charismatic authority’ xxviii—xxix, xxxviii
Charleville 558

Chelmno extermination camp 688-9, 693, 715, 965
Chemnitz-Zwickau 205

Cherbourg 806, 807, 808, 809, 864, 866

Chiang Kai-shek 395

China 370-71, 385

Choltitz, Dietrich von 866
Chotin 670

Christian, Gerda 929, 954, 960
Christianity 382, 661, 692, 824
Christie, Malcolm 387

chrome 867

Churches:
‘Church Question’ 661
escalating struggle 328, 355, 372, 381-2, 387, 413
and euthanasia programmes 530, 531, 533
fears of violence 341
internal conflicts 296-7
Nazi attacks on 349, 449
and November pogrom (1938) 463
rights of 282 see also Catholic Church; Protestant Church

Churchill, (Sir) Winston:
at Casablanca Conference (January 1943) 754
comes to power 553, 559
destruction of French ships 562
Dunkirk 559
and German invasion of France 560, 562
and Hefs affair 611, 617
H’s attacks on 728
and H’s Reichstag speech (6 October 1939) 539
nervous strain 645
and proposed German invasion 564-5
and public opinion 908-9
Scandinavian campaign 553
seen as warmonger 564, 567, 617, 898
and United States’ entry into war 656
witnesses Allied troops cross Rhine 893

at Yalta Conference (1945) 893, 904
Chvalkovsky, Franzisek 468, 477

Ciano, Galeazzo, Count of Cortellazzo and Buccari:
and Balkan campaign 603, 604, 607
and German occupation of France 560
and H’s talks with Mussolini 581, 710
and ‘Jewish Question’ 577
and Magda Goebbels 491
and Munich Agreement negotiations (1938) 444
and North African campaign 732, 736
and Polish crisis (1939) 489
visits H (1936) 370

Citadel, Operation 755-6, 762-3, 766-7, 769-70, 771-2, 774-5,
787-9

civil service: Jews dismissed from 288

Clafs, Heinrich 61, 153, 193

Clausewitz, Carl von 97

coal 641, 772

Cobra, Operation 861-2

Coburg 109, 193

cocaine 870, 923

code-breaking 761

coffee 650, 713

Cologne 354-5, 718, 892

Colombia 453

colonies 650, 713

Comines 59

Comintern 369
Anti-Comintern Pact (1936) 369, 370-71

‘Commissar Order’ (June 1941) 601-2, 819

‘Committee of Three’ (Dreierausschujs; Keitel, Lammers and
Bormann) 750-51, 753

Communism and Communists:
in Bavaria 67, 70, 87, 279
H’s call for Germany to reject 268
north German NSDAP sympathies for 168
and Reichstag fire (1933) 274-6
repressed in Prussia 273
in Saar 333
Soviet 67, 150, 178, 599, 670
and Spanish Civil War 364
violence against 302-3, 415 see also anti-Communism;
Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands

Community Foundation for the Care of Asylums 534
Community Patients’ Transport 534
Compiégne, Forest of 560

concentration and extermination camps 262, 459, 464, 469, 508,
520, 678, 687-9, 697, 715, 775, 943-4 see also Auschwitz-
Birkenau; Belzec; Buchenwald; Chelmno; Dachau; Majdanek;
Mauthausen; Ravensbrtick; Sachsenhausen; Sobibor; Treblinka

‘Confessing Church’ 296

Conti, Leonardo 532-3

coronary sclerosis 640, 782, 869, 871
corruption: in Nazi regime 225, 326-7
Corsica 581, 732, 772

Cossack (destroyer) 552

Cotentin peninsula 805, 806, 808
Cottbus 923, 927

Coulondre, Robert 503

Courland 889, 892

Courland army 923

‘Court of Honour’ 844

Coventry 570

Cracow 520, 574, 575-6, 687
Cramer-Klett, Theodor Freiherr von 161
Cremona 769

Crete 608

Crimea 628, 629, 630, 641, 643, 644, 663, 666, 710, 772, 774, 788,
798

Croatia 607, 677
Croydon airport 434

Crystal Night (9-10 November 1938) 449-50, 454, 457-60, 462-7,
679

cult of violence 106, 237, 272-4, 279-80, 302-3
Cvetkovic, Dragifa 603
Czech army 424, 426, 438, 478

Czechoslovakia:
‘Case Green’ 418, 427-8, 431, 433
deportation of Jews 574, 684, 685, 691
German invasion (1939) 476-80
and German rearmament 336, 384
international isolation 423-4, 470
Lidice massacre (June 1942) 714
national socialist party 100
Nazi atrocities following invasion 518
and proposed German expansion 385-6, 389-91, 414-23, 470,
475
proposed liquidation of 471, 473-6
raw materials 418, 474
Red Army threat to 908
renamed Czecho-Slovakia 474
reprisals following assassination of Heydrich 713-14
Slovak demands for independence 424, 476-7

Sudeten Germans 154, 417, 419, 420, 424, 426, 431, 432-3, 436,
437, 446
Sudetenland crisis (1938) 385, 386-7, 419, 424-47, 474, 493, 816
treaties with France and Soviet Union 423
the ‘Weekend Crisis’ (May 1938) 426-7
Czechs:
agitation against Czech workers 36
anti-Czech feeling 40, 419, 473-4
exiles 713

D-Day (6 June 1944) 804-6

Dachau 312
concentration camp 279-80, 312, 459, 547

DAF (Deutsche Arbeitsfront; German Labour Front) 289, 594, 934,
964

Dahlerus, Birger 503-5, 506, 509

Daily Mail 112

Daimler (car manufacturers) 117-18

Dakar 582

Daladier, Eduouard 444, 480, 503-4

Dalmatian islands 862

‘dam-buster’ raids 762

Dannecker, Theo 595-6

Danube river 867, 889, 913

Danzig (Gdansk):
Forster declared Head of State 506
German claims to 475, 483, 486, 492, 493-4, 504
German occupation 508-9, 516
German-speaking population 154, 493, 518

H tours (September 1939) 516, 517
Soviet advance on 914

Danzig Question 470-71, 481-2, 486, 493, 507

Danzig-West Prussia Reichsgau 517, 526

DAP see German Workers’ Party

Daranowski, Gerda 478, 515, 625

Dardanelles 585

Darlan, Jean Francois 732

Darmstadt 914

Darmstadter Bank 222

Darré, R. Walther 232, 324

Davos 455

Dawes, Charles G. 132

Dawes Plan 132, 193

‘Day of National Labour’ 288

‘Day of Potsdam’ 280, 288

DDP (Deutsche Demokratische Partei; German Democratic Party)
see Staatspartei

Delp, Alfred 824

democracy:
German power élites’ disregard for 198-9, 256, 257
German public’s disillusionment with 196, 257-8
H’s attacks on 119, 192
Weimar Republic 98, 178, 192, 199, 226

Denmark 552-3, 633, 775, 944, 961
Depression 196, 198, 222, 257-8, 261, 530
Dessau 456

‘Destructive Measures on Reich Territory’ (decree of 19 March
1945) 912-13

Deutsche Arbeitsfront (DAF; German Labour Front) 289, 594, 934,
964

Deutsche Bank 451
Deutsche Volkliste (German Ethnic List) 527

Deutsche Volkspartei (DVP; German People’s Party) 197, 199, 240,
289

Deutsche Werkgemeinschaft 101, 109
Deutsche Zeitung 105

Deutscher Kampfbund (German Combat League) 124, 126-7, 133,
37

Deutscher Tag (‘German Day’):
(1922) 109;
(1923) 123-4

Deutscher Volkswille (newspaper) 109
Deutsches Volksblatt (newspaper) 37, 42-3
Deutschland (battleship) 384, 481
Deutschlandflug (‘Germany Flight’) 227, 228, 231, 241
Deutschnationale Front (DNF; German National Front) 289
Deutschsozialistische Partei (DSP; German-Socialist Party) 81, 100-
101, 232
Deutschvolkische Freiheitspartei (DVFP) 141-2, 165
dialects 650
Dickel, Otto 97, 101-2
Diels, Rudolf 302, 305-6
Dienstelle Ribbentrop (Ribbentrop Bureau) 370
diet 22, 25, 160, 212, 380, 625, 720, 781, 850, 871
Dietrich, Otto 294, 322, 325, 376, 411, 477, 556, 613, 625, 792,
836
Dietrich, Sepp:
Ardennes offensive 881, 883
failure in Hungary 928, 943
and H’s leadership style 212, 356, 375
and Munich Soldiers’ Council 70

and the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ 309, 310, 311
retreat 913

transferred to Eastern Front 889
Dingfelder, Johannes 85, 86, 87
Dinter, Artur 144, 164
‘Directive No.6 for the Conduct of War’ 539

‘Directive No.16 for Preparations of a Landing Operation against
England’ 563

‘Directive No.17’ (intensifying war against Britain) 569
‘Directive No.18’ (invasion of Greece) 604

‘Directive No.20’ (occupation of Greek mainland) 604
‘Directive No.21’ (war against Soviet Union) 587, 609, 646
‘Directive No.33’ (occupation of Moscow) 637, 638
‘Directive No.34 (assault on Leningrad and Moscow) 638, 639
‘Directive No.41’ (Operation Blue) 710-11, 721

‘Directive No.45’ (Operation Braunschweig) 721, 722
‘Directive No.51’ (assault on Western Front) 778

Ditchley Park, Oxfordshire 611

Djibouti 581

DNF (Deutschnationale Front; German National Front) 289
Dnieper river 591, 641, 650, 770, 772, 774-5, 788
Dniester (Dnjestr) river 670, 796, 797

DNVP see German National People’s Party

Dobbin 953

dogs 56, 145, 701, 747, 781, 902, 903, 923, 952
Dohnanyi, Hans von 536, 541, 820, 825

Dollersheim 1

Dollfuss, Engelbert 317-18, 350, 401

Dollmann, Friedrich 804

Don river 644, 650, 719, 721, 723, 729, 736

Donets Basin 638, 641, 644, 709, 754, 772

Donitz, Karl:
dissuades H from scrapping Geneva convention 905
in Fuhrer Bunker 923
and German surrender 959, 961-3
held in high favour by H 941, 950
and Himmler’s offer to surrender 943, 947
imprisonment 964-5
loyalty to H 899, 900, 959
promises new submarines 863, 889
replaces Raeder 761
responsibility for northern zone of Reich 919, 925, 934
and Soviet advances in the east 814
substitutes for H at ‘Heroes’ Memorial Day’ 798
to be head of state after H 950, 952
urges H to leave Fithrer Bunker 929

Donizetti, Gaetano 20

Dorpmiller, Julius 925

Dorsch, Xaver 799-800

Dortmund 762, 894

‘Dr Koester’s Anti-Gas Pills’ 869, 870

Dragoon, Operation 866

Dresden 709, 893, 894, 905

Dresdner Bank 222, 451

Drexler, Anton:
and chairmanship of NSDAP 95, 103, 111
and failed putsch (1923) 134
founding of German Workers’ Party 82-3, 84-6
and H’s membership of German Workers’ Party 75-6
and H’s refounding of NSDAP 163

My Political Awakening 75
drugs 869, 870, 902, 923

DSP (Deutschsozialistische Partei; German-Socialist Party) 81, 100-
11, 252

Duesterberg, Theodor 193, 194, 226, 254-5
Duisburg 728, 762
Dulles, Allen 961
Diinaburg 626
Dunkirk 557-9
Diisseldorf 224, 728, 762, 892, 912, 968
Dutch East Indies 579
DVFP (Deutschvolkische Freiheitspartei) 141-2, 165

DVP (Deutsche Volkspartei; German People’s Party) 197, 199, 240,
289

dysentery 639-40

‘Eagle’s Eyrie’ (Adlerhorst; Fiihrer Headquarters) 882, 888, 894
‘Eagle’s Nest’ (Berghof ‘Tea House’) 494, 495
East Indies 579

East Prussia 205, 470, 475, 517-18, 535, 586, 624, 635, 687, 814,
859, 879, 888, 890, 892, 894, 905, 914

‘East Wall’ 471, 521, 631

‘Eastern Aid’ (Osthilfe) 251

eastern expansion 152-5, 177, 180, 475, 486, 712-13 see also
expansionism; ‘living space’

Ebermannstadt 508

Eberswalde 921

Ebert, Friedrich 108, 165

Echtmann, Fritz 958

Eckart, Dietrich:
anti-Bolshevism 152
Auf gut Deutsch 95
and German Workers’ Party 83
holidays with H 123, 177

on H’s megalomania 112
introduces H 116
and NSDAP 93, 95, 98, 100, 102-3
and Thule Society 82
volkisch poet 75, 94-5
Economic Staff for the East 634
Ecuador 453
Eden, Anthony (later 1st Earl of Avon) 333, 336-7, 407
Edward VIII, King 369
Egypt 485, 717-18
Ehrhardt, Hermann 106, 107-8
Eichmann, Adolf:
advocates Jewish state in Palestine 453
and badges for Jews 679-80
development of genocidal policy 594, 595-6, 678, 681-2
and extermination camps 688
favours pogroms 455
and ‘Final Solution’ 330, 696, 965
forces emigration of Viennese Jews 450
hanged 965
and Jewish expulsions 574, 681-2, 795
and ‘Madagascar solution’ 577
rise to power 330
runs ‘Jewish Department’ of SD 330, 415, 577
Eicke, Theodor 311
Eicken, Karl von 849
Eifel 556, 881
Einsatzgruppen (task forces):
Czechoslovakia 518
Einsatzgruppe A 670
Einsatzgruppe B 670
Einsatzgruppe C 670, 674-5
genocidal programme 668, 670-72, 674-5

Operation Barbarossa 618
Poland 518-20, 521, 522

Soviet Union 668, 670-72, 674-5
and Wehrmacht 671-2

Einsatzkommandos (‘task forces’) 618, 670, 674-5, 689
Einwohnerwehr (Citizens’ Defence Force) 94, 107, 120
Eisenhower, Dwight D. 866, 884, 893, 945, 962
Eisner, Kurt 66-7, 70, 132

Ekaterinburg 590

El Alamein 727, 730

Elbe river 927, 930, 935

Elberfeld 167-8, 762
elections:
Landtag: (1924) 132, 141;
(1929) 192-3, 196-7, 200;
(1931) 222, 227;
(1932) 227-8, 230;
(1933) 284
Reich Presidency: (1925) 165;
(1932) 224, 226-7
Reichstag (1924) 132-3, 141-2, 144, 165, 178;
(1928) 187, 190, 204;
(1930) 198, 199, 202, 204-6, 209, 223;
(1932) 224, 230, 231-2, 235, 240-42;
(1933) 264-5, 272, 277-8, 299-300;
(1936) 353, 356;
(1938) 414
Elisabeth, Czarina of Russia 918
Elser, Georg 537, 545-7, 816
Elsterwerda 927
Eltz-Rtibenach, Paul Freiherr von 254

Emsland 395

Enabling Act (1933) 263-4, 281-2, 317
Engel, Gerhard 515, 524, 583, 586, 589, 593, 653-4, 725
Engelhardt, Philipp 55
Engels, Friedrich 49
England see Britain
English Channel 704
Epp, Franz Ritter von 190, 283
Erbersdobler, Otto 210
Erfurt 687
Ewige Jude, Der (‘The Eternal Jew’; film) 525-6, 593
Erzberger, Matthias 86, 108
Essen 894, 918
Esser, Hermann:
compares H with Mussolini 110
dominant Esser clique of NSDAP 167, 169, 170
expelled from NSDAP 103, 163
flees to Austria 140
gutter journalist 70, 98
and GVG 141, 144
H defends 69
and H’s refounding of NSDAP 163, 164
and north German NSDAP 167

reads H’s final proclamation 907
reunion with H (April 1942) 709

Estonia 487, 677
‘ethnic cleansing’ policies:
Berlin 452, 454, 461-2
Poland 518-27, 549, 573-5
Soviet Union 683

Ethnic German Self-Protection (Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz) 519
Etzdorf, Hasso von 536, 542
eugenics 530

Euskirchen 556

‘euthanasia action’ programme 187, 528-35, 536, 548, 687, 688,
715, 965

Evian Conference (1938) 462
Exeter 708
expansionism 152-5, 180, 360, 368, 388-91, 448-9, 472-3

Falaise Pocket 864-5, 867
Fallersleben 490

Far East: conflict in 361, 385
Farinacci, Roberto 769

Fascism and Fascists:
in Italy 151, 762, 768, 769, 774
legend of heroic ‘seizure of power’ 110-11
salute 120
Fatherland Party 82
Faulhaber, Michael 373
Feder, Gottfried:
antisemitism 92, 95
in Bavarian revolutionary period 70
and H’s refounding of NSDAP 164
lectures 73, 75
‘philosopher’ of NSDAP 98
Reichstag deputy 190
and Thule Society 82
Fegelein, Gretl (née Braun) 491, 922, 942
Fegelein, Hermann 922, 942, 945, 946
Felix, Operation 592
Fellgiebel, Erich 830, 831, 833, 843, 846, 847
Felsennest (Rock Eyrie; Fithrer Headquarters) 556, 748

Feltre 767

Fifth Army (Soviet) 641

Fighting League of the Commercial Middle Class (Kampfbund des
gewerblichen Mittelstandes) 285, 286
films:
H’s love of 293, 325, 377, 430, 781
Der Ewige Jude (‘The Eternal Jew’) 525-6, 593
The Great King 702
King Kong 293
Kolberg 858, 908
‘Traitors before the People’s Court’ 847
‘Triumph of the Will’ 319

‘Final Solution’:
Eichmann and 330, 696, 965
extended to all corners of Nazi imperium 775-6
and genocidal link in Mein Kampf 467
halting of 878
Himmler and 715-17, 764-5, 776-7, 878
and H’s last Testament 949
and H’s public speeches 801-3
ideology of total annihilation 695
and Nazi atrocities in Warthegau 527, 549, 677
secrecy of 715-17
and territorial resettlement of Jews 596, 669, 678, 682-5, 714-15
Wannsee Conference (January 1942) 690, 695, 696-7

Finland 499, 551, 552, 569, 584, 585, 586, 718, 793, 868

First World War:
armistice 560-61, 961
German defeat xxviii, 47, 59, 60-61, 62-3, 731, 887, 961
H as dispatch runner 54-5, 57
H promoted to corporal 53-4
and H’s antisemitism 41-2, 56-7, 58, 62-5, 150
H’s fanaticism 56-7, 61-2, 326, 850, 852, 887, 910
H’s Iron Crosses 55, 59
losses 53, 54, 59

the Marne 58-9
mustard gas attacks 59-60
outbreak 51-2
the Somme 51, 57
Verdun 107
as vital to H’s future 47, 51-2, 78, 631, 850, 852
‘world war’ term 693
Ypres 53, 58 see also Versailles Treaty (1919)
Fischlham 490
Flensburg 961, 962, 963
Flick (corporation) 451
Florence 582, 583
Florian, Friedrich Karl 912
Foch, Ferdinand 560
‘For the Protection of People and State’ decree (1933) 276-7, 278-9
‘Foreign Armies East’ department 888
Forster, Albert:
hanged 965
‘head of state’ 506, 517, 526-7
NSDAP leader in Danzig 492, 494
proclaims Danzig’s reincorporation in Reich 509
Forster, Helmuth 666
Four-Year Plan 364-8, 397, 402, 403, 460, 461, 474, 634
Fournes en Weppes 54, 57
Foxl (terrier) 56
France:
African possessions 581, 582, 583
Allied advances in 806-10, 813, 851, 861-7
and Allied assault on Germany 892
and the Anschlufg 407, 408
boycott of German goods 286
and Czechoslovakia 423, 424, 433, 439, 442-3

D-Day landings 804-6

deportation of Jews 578, 594, 689

fortification of Atlantic coast 786

‘Free French’ 583

French Indo-China 579

French North Africa 732-3

and Geneva Disarmament Conference 297-8
German invasion 557, 559-60

and German rearmament 334, 336

as Germany’s ‘arch-enemy’ 151, 154, 169, 208, 334, 471
influence in eastern Europe 331, 332

and Memelland 481

navy 560, 562

obstacle to German expansionism 388, 390
occupation 561-2, 712, 732-3, 866

pact with Soviet Union 332, 337, 351, 352, 354, 364
and Poland 503-4

rearmament 480, 496

and remilitarization of Rhineland 351, 355
Resistance 866

right-wing funding 118

Ruhr occupation (1923) 118, 119, 121, 151, 170
and Saarland 332, 333

treaty with Belgium (1921/35) 334

Vichy government 561, 578, 579, 580-83

Franciscans 382

Franco, Francisco 362-3, 368, 384-5, 497, 580-81, 582, 592
Franco-Prussian war 7

Francois-Poncet, André 443, 444

Franconia 109-10, 205, 339-40

Frank, Hans:

Bavarian Justice Minister 278
and death of Geli Raubal 221
deportation of Polish Jews 669, 687

and development of genocidal programme 694-5, 715
envoy to Italy 369

General Governor in Poland 517, 669

and Hels affair (May 1941) 614

and H’s imprisonment in Landsberg 145

on H’s speeches 88-9

and ‘Jewish Question’ 574-6, 578-9

and Leipzig Reichswehr trial 207

and Mein Kampf 147

and Nazi atrocities in Poland 522, 526, 574-6
Poland as ‘transit camp’ for Jews 669

and removal of Jews from Vienna 595, 596
and Thule Society 82

trial and execution 964

Warsaw rising (1944) 868

Frank, Karl Hermann 433

Frankfurt am Main 454, 689, 914, 915

Frankfurt an der Oder 891, 920

Frankfurter, David 455

Franz Eher-Verlag 147

Franz Ferdinand, Archduke 51

Frederick I Barbarossa, Holy Roman Emperor 176

Frederick II ‘the Great’, King of Prussia 97, 112, 157, 181, 213, 379,
666, 702, 743, 781, 852, 882, 902, 909, 915, 918

freemasonry 165, 369, 449

Freikorps 106, 107, 170, 190

Freikorps Adolf Hitler 917

Freisler, Roland 707, 741, 844-5, 847-8
French Indo-China 579

French North Africa 732

French Resistance 866

Freyend, Ernst John von 830, 831
Freytag-Loringhoven, Bernd von 937

Frick, Wilhelm:
and the Anschlufs 411
and anti-Jewish legislation 342, 343, 345-6, 347, 348
and deal with Schleicher 232, 233
and emergency decree 276
and Enabling Act (1933) 281
and ‘German Revolution’ 303
and H’s negotiations with Hindenburg 252
and H’s refounding of NSDAP 164
and the ‘Law for the Emergency Defence of the State’ (1934) 314
Minister of Interior 232, 252, 254
minister in Thuringian government 197
Ministerial Council for the Defence of the Reich 506
and occupation of Poland 522
and putsch attempt (1923) 129, 131, 134, 197
‘Reich reform’ 329
Reichstag deputy 190, 208, 239
and remilitarization of Rhineland 353
replaced by Himmler 771
trial and execution 964

Friedeburg, Hans-Georg von 962, 963
Frief$ner, Johannes 814
Fritsch, Theodor 91

Fritsch, Werner Freiherr von on ‘abyss’ of war 498
and Blomberg scandal (1938) 392
Commander-in-Chief of German army 334
death 399
the Fritsch scandal (1938) 320, 393-400, 404, 408, 416, 418, 422,
536
and German expansionism 390
and November pogrom (1938) 464
and rearmament 334-5, 352, 353, 360

Fromelles 47, 57
Fromm, Friedrich 662, 827, 828, 834, 835, 839-41, 844, 845-6
Frontbann 143

fuel:
plants 801, 893
reserves 556, 590, 710, 735, 929
shortages 851, 861, 874-5, 884, 886
synthetic 361, 365, 366, 889

Fuhrer authority/power xxiv, xxxvii-xl

Fuhrer Bunker, Berlin:
description of 901-2
H’s last days in 901-4, 922-6, 928-31, 938-43, 951-5
mass break-out from 960-61

Fuhrer Chancellery 531-2, 534

Fuhrer cult:

development of 110-13, 119-20, 185, 262

endurance of 900, 967-8

establishment of Ftihrer state 318-19, 320-30, 511-12, 529, 534,
709

and H as symbol of national unity 292-3

‘Heil Hitler’ greeting 293, 762, 962

‘heroic-leader’ idea 156-7, 850-51

and H’s leadership style 214-15, 812

and H’s public speaking 181

the ‘idea’ and the Leader become inseparable 172, 185, 200-201,
330

infallibility of Leader 422

‘Mein Fuhrer’ form of address 211, 373

and ‘national community’ 203-4, 262

and neo-conservative intellectuals 291

origins of 78

party rallies and 319

and party unity 186

widening gulf between Fihrer and people 744-5, 747-8 see also
‘working towards the Fuhrer’ concept
Fuhrer Escort Squad (Fiihrerbegleitkommando) 957, 960
Fuhrer Headquarters see Adlerhorst; Margival; Rock Eyrie; Werwolf;
Wolf’s Lair
Fuhrer myth:
central tenet of H’s belief 181
economic recovery and 270, 271
and Hoffmann’s photographs 52
and loyalty and betrayal 614
and Mein Kampf 148
propaganda weapon 181
Fiihrer-Informationen (bulletins) 857
‘Fiihrer-Machine’ (typewriter) 857
Fiihrerbegleitkommando (Fuhrer Escort Squad) 957, 960
Funk, Walther:
and ‘Committee of Three’ 750-51, 752
and H’s last Testament 950
imprisonment 964-5
and November pogrom (1938) 460
and party funding 225
in Propaganda Ministry 293, 324, 836
takes over Economics Ministry 398
visits H (October 1941) 650
Funk, Wilhelm 160-61
Furstenberg 232
Firth 758
Furtwangler, Wilhelm 710

Fuschl 768

Galicia 697, 796
Galland, Adolf 874

Gansser, Emil 118

Gargzdai 670

Garmisch-Partenkirchen 348, 351
gas, poison 687-8, 693

Gatow aerodrome 926, 931, 935

Gaulle, Charles de 583, 732

Gayl, Wilhelm Freiherr von 239
Gdansk see Danzig

Gehlen, Reinhard 810, 888, 889

Gelsenkirchen 893

Gemlich, Adolf 74-5, 80, 91-2

General Electric Company 193

General Government: and ‘Final Solution’ 677, 696-7, 698
General Plan for the East (Generalplan Ost) 669, 682
Geneva conventions 623, 905

Geneva Disarmament Conference (1932-4) 254, 297-300
Genghis Khan 720, 888

Genoa 769

genocide:
development of Nazi genocidal policy 459, 468-9, 524-31, 572-9,
594-8, 618, 668-99, 714-17, 775-7, 802-3, 969
in Mein Kampf 149-50, 467
Nazi and Soviet compared xxxiv—xxxv

geopolitics 154

Gera 307

Gercke, Rudolf 662
German air-force see Luftwaffe

German army:

conscription 333, 334, 335-6, 351, 711, 854

equipping of 474, 590-91

flawed communications with Wehrmacht 553-4, 755

General Staff Headquarters, Zossen 536, 542, 543, 605, 895, 920

last counter-offensive (March 1945) 908, 914

legacy of Blomberg-Fritsch scandals 418, 422

losses 645-6, 652, 711, 798, 811, 857, 865, 868, 886, 893

and the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ 316

oath of unconditional loyalty to H 317-18

Operations Department 624

Reserve Army 662, 835, 845, 860

resistance to H’s foreign policy 418, 422-3, 425, 429-30

retreat across the Rhine 892-3

size 333, 334-5, 888

spring/summer offensive (1942) 700, 710-13, 719-26

weakness of leadership 498, 564, 647

winter crisis on Eastern Front (1941-2) 645-6, 647, 651-6, 661-
7, 693, 700, 704, 710 see also Army groups; Reichswehr;
Wehrmacht

German Army High Command (Oberkommando des Heeres; OKH):
complicity in murderous policy in Soviet Union 599-603
conflicts with H over strategy 554-5, 591, 604, 636-7, 641-3,

647-8, 719-21, 724-5, 786-9
declaration of loyalty (March 1944) 796
and drive for Moscow and Leningrad 641-3, 647-8
lack of coordinated command structure 711, 756
and ‘Manstein plan’ 555
and occupation of Italy 773
and opening of Eastern Front 589-91
and Operation Barbarossa 636

and Operation Citadel 755-6

‘permanent treachery’ 843-4, 846

spring/summer offensive (1942) 711, 721

winter crisis on Eastern Front (1941-2) 652-3
‘German Christians’ 296

German Combat League (Deutscher Kampfbund) 124, 126-7, 133,
137

German Communist Party see Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands

‘German Day’ (Deutscher Tag):
(1922) 109;
(1923) 123-4

German Evangelical Church 296

German Labour Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront; DAF) 289, 594, 934,
964

German language 650
German National Front (Deutschnationale Front; DNF) 289

German National People’s Party (DNVP):
capitulates 289-90
Graefe and 141
Hugenberg and 193, 222-3, 253
and ‘National Opposition’ 222-3
opposition to H 243
Reichstag elections: (1930) 204-5;
(1932) 242
Schleicher and 251
and vote of no-confidence in government 239, 240

German navy:
Anglo-German Naval Agreement (1935) 337-8, 368-9, 486
flawed communications within Wehrmacht 553-4
High Command 608, 617-18
preparation for war with Britain 422, 550
and proposed invasion of Britain 565, 567
in Scandinavia 551-2, 553

sinking of Bismarck 617-18
size of 337, 338

steel supplies 387

Z-Plan 471, 550

German News Agency 346
German People’s Party (DVP) 197, 199, 240, 289
German Radical Party 32

German Workers’ Party (DAP):
committee 85
founding of 82-3
H joins 75-7
H’s role in early development 83-9
programme 85-6
renaming 87 see also National Socialist German Workers’ Party
(NSDAP)

German-Socialist Party (Deutschsozialistische Partei; DSP) 81, 100-
It gon

German-Soviet Treaty of Friendship (28 September 1939) 517
Germanen-Orden 81-2

Germany:

agreement with Austria (1936) 369-70, 386, 402

alliance with Italy 151, 169, 369-70, 371, 402, 403, 471

Allied assault on 892-3, 908, 914, 918, 935

Allied bombing raids 570, 718, 727-8, 748, 752-3, 762-3, 770,
789-90, 799, 851, 861, 893-4, 900-901, 921

Anglo-German Naval Agreement (1935) 337-8, 368-9, 486

Anti-Comintern Pact (1936) 369, 370-71

capitulation xxix, 895, 904, 958-9, 961-3

cultural ‘coordination’ under Nazis 291

declaration of war on United States (11 December 1941) 606-7,
658-60, 690, 693-4

Depression 196, 198, 222, 257-8, 261, 530

diplomatic relations with Soviet Union 331-2, 488-9, 583-6

division of 969
economic crisis of 1929 185, 190-96, 199
economic crisis of 1936 359-61, 365
failure of ‘total war’ effort 746-7, 854-60
French occupation of Ruhr (1923) 118, 119, 121, 151, 170
German-Japanese alliance 657
hatred of Britain 562
hyperinflation (1923) 108, 114, 125
introduction of Rentenmark 132
judicial system 705-7, 708-9, 848
national pride 372
non-aggression pact with Poland (1934) 298, 331, 483, 486
non-aggression pact with Soviet Union (1939) 496, 498-9, 500,
501, 502, 551, 580, 585, 621
‘Pact of Steel’ (1939) 487
paramilitary politics 121
plebiscites 193, 196, 299-300, 317, 318, 332, 414
post-First World War political climate 77-9, 108, 258-9
radicalization of home front 705-9, 715, 744, 749-50, 854-7
reparations 96, 132, 191, 193, 198, 208, 222
return of Saar (1935) 332-3
Revolution of 1918 60, 62-3, 66-71, 80
Soviet invasion 890, 893, 919-21
trade treaty with Soviet Union (1939) 488-9, 495-6
Treaty of Friendship with Soviet Union (1939) 517
Tripartite Pact (1940) 580, 584
unique circumstances allowing H’s rise to power 256-9
war debts 661
wartime shortages 502, 573, 680, 705
withdrawal from League of Nations (1933) 297-300, 331, 351 see
also First World War; Second World War; Third Reich; Weimar
Republic
Germany Flight’ (Deutschlandflug) 227, 228, 231, 241
Gersdorff, Rudolph-Christoph Freiherr von 819, 820, 821, 822, 824

Gerstenmaier, Eugen 824, 846

Gestapo (Secret State Police):
and Blomberg scandal (1938) 392
and development of genocidal programme 675
and Fritsch scandal (1938) 395, 396
and the ‘Jewish problem’ 340, 341, 343, 384, 452
Miiller as head 671
‘Night of the Long Knives’ 312
and November pogrom (1938) 457-8
and opposition groups 741, 823, 825, 828
torture of July plotters 846

Geyr von Schweppenburg, Leo 813

Gibraltar 567, 580, 582, 591-2, 730

Giesing, Erwin 849, 869-70

Giesler, Hermann 561, 709, 903

Giesler, Paul 950

Giraud, Henri 732

Gisevius, Hans-Bernd 541

Glaise-Horstenau, Edmund 405, 408

Glasgow 611

Gleichschaltung (‘coordination’) 282-3, 291, 297, 410
Gleiwitz 508

Globocnik, Odilo 575, 688

Glogau 891

Gneisenau (battleship) 704

Gneisenau, August Graf Neithardt von 809
Godesberg Memorandum 438-9, 440, 441, 445
Godin, Reinhart, Freiherr von 59

Goebbels, Joseph:
adoration of H 171, 173, 181, 379, 592, 909
and Allied bombing raids 790, 905
and Allied invasion 804, 805, 808-10

and annexation of Memelland (1939) 481

anti-clericalism 661

appointed Gauleiter of Berlin 171

appointed Propaganda Leader of Nazi Party 200

and Ardennes offensive 881

and assassination attempts on H (November 1939) 544-5;

(July 1944) 836-9, 843, 844-5, 847

and Austrian Question 385-6, 407-8, 409, 411, 414

background 167-8

and Balkan campaign 607

and ban on intermarriage 343

and battle for Stalingrad 737, 739, 742

and Blomberg scandal (1938) 393

and bombing of the Deutschland (1937) 384

and Bormann’s restructuring for peacetime Germany 916-17

and boycott of Jewish businesses 286

brings news of death of Roosevelt 918

and Briining’s resignation 229-30

Christmas present to H (1937) 377

and ‘Committee of Three’ 750-51

conflict with Churches 381, 382

construction of ‘Westwall’ 431

and Czechoslovakia 386, 420, 431, 445, 476, 477, 479

on dangers of H’s declining authority 913, 915-16

and deal with Schleicher 232-3

and declaration of war against United States 658, 659-60

and deportations and massacres of Jews 595, 669, 671, 680-81,
683, 685-7, 689, 694, 698-9

diary 168, 361, 364, 381, 385, 456, 457, 465, 691, 780, 843

disappointed by H 170, 171

and disposal of H’s body 956-7

and economic crisis of 1936 360-61

field-marshals’ declaration of loyalty (March 1944) 796

and ‘Final Solution’ 714-15, 777

and Frick 771

and Fritsch scandal (1938) 396, 397, 398, 399

in Fiihrer Bunker 902, 923, 929-30, 931, 936-7, 938, 939, 940-
41, 943, 946, 950, 954, 955

on generals’ opposition to H 843, 844-5

and ‘German Revolution’ 303

and German surrender 958, 959

H proposes for Ministry for the People’s Education 232

and Hefs affair (May 1941) 613-14, 615

his ‘Damascus’ 170-71, 173

and H’s last Testament 950-51

on H’s negotiations with Hindenburg 243, 254

in H’s Reich Chancellery entourage 293, 324, 376

ideological fanaticism 168

inferiority complex 168

and invasion of Hungary (March 1944) 793-4

and Italian crisis (July 1943) 768-9

and ‘Jewish Question’ 347, 381, 452-5, 577-8, 679, 694, 698-9,
759-60, 763-4

Kolberg (film) 858, 908

and ‘leadership crisis’ 748, 751-3

and Leipzig Reichswehr trial (1930) 207

marital problems 463, 492

memorandum to H (September 1944) 872-3

and Munich Agreement negotiations (1938) 436-7, 438-9, 441,
444, 445

and Nazi atrocities in Poland 521, 525-6, 549

and the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ 310, 311-12, 315

and north German NSDAP 167-9, 170

and November pogrom (1938) 455-63, 465-7

and Nuremberg rallies 344

and occupation of France 561, 562

and opening of Western Front 540, 555

and Operation Barbarossa 618, 620-21, 622, 623-4, 626, 627

organizes torchlight procession (30 January 1933) 261

and Papen’s Marburg speech (1934) 307-8

plans for ‘racial cleansing’ of Berlin 454

and Polish crisis (1939) 502, 503, 507, 511

preparations for invasion of Britain 562-3, 564

and proposals for ending war 897-8, 899, 904, 908-9

radicalization of home front 705-6, 707, 854—7

and rearmament 353, 354, 364, 384

refashions H’s image 701-2

Reich Minister of People’s Enlightenment and Propaganda 280,
288, 291

Reichstag deputy 190

and Reichstag elections: (1930) 202, 204;

(1932) 227-8, 231, 241;

(1933) 277;

(1936) 356

and Reichstag fire (1933) 274-5

relationship with H 378-9, 909

reminiscing with H 719

and Russian campaign 640, 644, 648-9, 651, 654

and SA revolt (1931) 217

and Saar plebiscite (1935) 332

and Scandinavian campaign 552-3

and Soviet-German non-aggression pact (1939) 496

and spring offensive (1942) 713

on Stalin 385

and Strasser’s resignation of party offices 245, 248

suicide 960

‘total war’ effort 705-6, 745-7, 749, 750-51, 808-10, 855-8

tours bombed-out cities 762

urges peace offer with Stalin 773

and ‘Winter Aid’ campaign 728

and winter crisis on Eastern Front (1941-2) 648, 665, 667, 704

witness at H’s wedding 948

worries about depression in popular mood 799, 807

Goebbels, Magda 491, 909, 954, 955, 960
Goerdeler, Carl:

and Four-Year Plan 364-5
opposition to H 418, 541, 819, 823, 846

Gold Beach 805

Goldap 879

Goliath tanks 877
Gollancz, (Sir) Victor 968
Goltz, Count von der 194
Gombos, Gyula 114
Gomorrha, Operation 770
Goring, Edda 924

Goring, Emmy 924

Goring, Hermann:
agitates against Manstein 797
aircraft production 800-801
ambitions to run War Ministry 397
announces existence of German air-force 334
and the AnschlufS§ 403, 407-11
appointed head of SA 112
‘aryanization’ policy 383, 463
background 112
and Balkan campaign 608
and battle for Stalingrad 734, 735, 738
blamed for Allied bombing raids 718, 752-3, 762, 768, 790-91,

797, 880

and Blomberg scandal (1938) 392-3
business links 223, 224, 268-9
and ‘Committee of Three’ 750, 751, 752
construction of ‘Westwall’ 425
and Czechoslovakia 418, 442-3, 444, 478-9
and D-Day 805
designated H’s successor 624
and development of genocidal programme 676
and Dunkirk 558-9
and economic crisis of 1936 360-61
and Enabling Act (1933) 281

expelled from all offices 949

extravagance 224-5

foreign policy ideas 403, 406

and Four-Year Plan 364-7, 397, 403, 461, 634

and Fritsch scandal (1938) 395, 396, 397, 398, 399, 408
and German expansion plans 386-7, 390, 418, 422-3
and German occupation of France 560-61

H proposes for Air Ministry 232

and Halder 726

and Hels affair (May 1941) 612, 614

and Himmler 329

house-arrest 933

on H’s military genius 607

and H’s negotiations with Hindenburg 252, 253, 254, 255
and H’s Reich Chancellery entourage 293, 376

and Italian crisis (July 1943) 768-9

and ‘Jewish Question’ 450, 461, 464, 575, 598, 678, 679
and July 1944 assassination attempt 832

leadership of Luftwaffe 641

leaves Fiihrer Bunker 923-4

made Field-Marshal 398

Ministerial Council for the Defence of the Reich 506, 751, 752
and Munich Agreement negotiations (1938) 442-3, 444
and Nazi atrocities in Poland 520

and the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ 312, 313

and North African campaign 736

and November pogrom (1938) 460-63, 465, 467

and opening of Western Front 538, 541, 558

and outbreak of war 513

and Papen 317

and party funding 224-5

and personality cult of H 112, 284

and plans for ‘New Order’ 633

and Polish crisis (1939) 503, 504, 509, 511

and Potempa murder affair (1932) 237

prestige at rock-bottom 900

promoted to Reich Marshal 564
proposals for ending war 897-8, 899
and proposed invasion of Britain 563-4, 570
Prussian Minister of the Interior 273, 284
Prussian Minister President 283-4
and putsch attempt (1923) 128, 131
and rearmament 352, 353, 387
Reichstag deputy 190
and Reichstag fire (1933) 275
Reichstag President 240
and Ribbentrop 471, 472
and Russian Campaign 627, 634
and the SA 303, 306, 309, 310
and Spanish Civil War 362-3
stripped of rights of succession 932-3
suicide 964
terror-wave in Prussia 273—4
and Total War Effort 855
‘utterly unimaginable’ as leader of nation 913
and winter crisis on Eastern Front (1941-2) 662
Gorki 653
Gottingen 141, 167
Graefe, Albrecht 141
Graf, Ulrich 98
Graf, Willi 741
Grafeneck 534
Grandel, Gottfried 95
Grauert, Ludwig 276
Grave 866

Great Britain see Britain
Great King, The (film) 702

‘great men’ theories xxxv-xxxvi, 157, 181

‘Greater German National Community’ (Grof$deutsche
Volksgemeinschaft; GVG) 140-41, 144

Greece 581, 583, 591, 604-5, 607, 608, 609-10, 862, 867
Greenland 761

Greim, Robert Ritter von 938, 946-7, 963
Greiner, Helmuth 735

Greiner, Josef 23, 29, 41

Greiser, Arthur 526-7, 575-6, 684-5, 891, 965
Grimm, Hans 154

Grodno 626

Groener, Wilhelm 228-9

Grohé, Josef 341

Groscurth, Helmuth 433, 442, 536, 541, 543

Gro&deutsche Volksgemeinschaft (GVG; ‘Greater German National
Community’) 140-41, 144

Grofsraumwirtschaft (‘greater economic sphere’) 403

Grozny 711, 722, 723, 725

Gruhn, Margarethe 392

‘Gruko’ (Bayerische Reichswehr Gruppenkommando Nr.4) 71-2
Grynszpan, Herschel 455, 467

Guderian, Heinz:
back in favour 754
and Battle of Kiev 642-4
clashes with H 895-6, 914-15
in ‘Court of Honour’ 844
dismissal (December 1941) 666
fails to simplify military command 788
and ‘Manstein plan’ 554
and Operation Citadel 766, 767
replaced by Krebs 915
replaces Zeitzler 813, 814, 850

and Soviet advances in the east 879, 888-9, 891-2, 894-6, 911

and Warsaw rising 868

and winter crisis on Eastern Front (1941-2) 652-3, 656, 662-3,
665-6

Gumbinnen 879
Gtinsche, Otto 715, 922, 946, 954, 955, 956-8, 960

Gurtner, Franz:
attempts to curb police power 329
and ‘Blood Law’ 346
death 705
and Dohnanyi 536
and ‘euthanasia action’ 528-9
and Fritsch scandal (1938) 395, 396, 399
and the ‘Law for the Emergency Defence of the State’ (1934) 314
and May Day affair (1923) 123
and release of Hef’ from Landsberg 161
and removal of ban on NSDAP 162

Gustloff, Wilhelm 348, 455
Gutmann, Hugo 59
GVG see Grof&deutsche Volksgemeinschaft gypsies 521, 574, 618

Haase, Ludolf 141, 142

Haase, Werner 952, 953

Habsburg monarchy 9, 27, 47, 401
Hacha, Emil 477-8

Hadamar 534

Haeften, Werner von 829, 830, 831-2, 834, 839, 840, 841, 845
Hafeld 490

Haffner, Sebastian 259

Hagen, Hans 838

Hahn, Otto 874

Haifa 567

Halder, Franz:

and Balkan campaign 605

and battle for Stalingrad 727

and Brauchitsch 428, 540-41

dismissal 726

and drive for Moscow and Leningrad 639, 640, 642-3, 646, 647-8

in Fuhrer Headquarters 624, 720

H’s contempt for 646, 724

and July plotters 846

and Nazi atrocities in Poland 520

and opening of Eastern Front 566, 568-9, 586-7, 589-90, 591,
600, 609

and opening of Western Front 540-41, 555, 558

and Operation Barbarossa 619, 627, 635-6, 637, 638

and plans for coup d’état: (1938) 445, 483;

(1939) 540-41, 542, 543, 544

and Polish crisis (1939) 483-4, 507, 516

and proposed invasion of Britain 567

and spring/summer offensive (1942) 711, 712, 721, 722, 723, 724

and winter crisis on Eastern Front (1941-2) 651, 653, 662, 663-4,
667, 711

Halifax, E.F.L. Wood, Viscount (later 1st Earl of Halifax):
and the Anschlufs 410
appointed Foreign Secretary 407
and Polish crisis (1939) 501, 503-5, 506
potential peace terms (1940) 565, 566
and Sudeten crisis (1938) 426, 433
visits Germany (1937) 402

‘Halt Order’ (December 1941) 665-7

Hamburg:
bombing of 770-71, 802
city elections: (1931) 222;
(1932) 227-8
H speaks in 177-9, 221
Hotel Atlantik 214

Nazi seizure of power 278
Speer in 925, 931, 932

Hamburger Nationalklub 177-9

Hamilton, Douglas Douglas-Hamilton, 14th Duke of 611-12, 617

Hamm 918

Hammerstein-Equord, Kurt Freiherr von 265

Hammitzsch, Angela (née Hitler, then Raubal; H’s half-sister) 2, 3,
16, 34, 177, 218, 220

Hanau 915

Hanfstaengl, Egon 160

Hanfstaengl, Ernst ‘Putzi’: background 114

first encounters H 97, 115
and funding of NSDAP 117
H stays with after release from Landsberg 160
on H’s personality and leadership style 209-10, 212-13
and H’s sexuality 115, 175
as H’s ‘social secretary’ 115-16
and H’s trial (1924) 134
and Leipzig Reichswehr trial (1930) 207-8
and personality cult of H 112, 114-15
in Propaganda Ministry 293
and putsch attempt (1923) 131-2
and Reichstag fire (1933) 274-5
relations with H 211
Hanfstaengl, Helene 115, 132, 175, 218
Hanisch, Reinhold 22, 30-32, 33, 34, 40-41, 43-4
Hanke, Karl 891, 905, 950
Hanover 205, 455, 556, 918
Harlan, Veit 858
Harpe, Josef 890-91

Harrer, Karl 82-3, 84-5

Harris, Arthur 893
Hartheim 534

Harz mountains 630
‘Harzburg Front’ 223, 226

Hase, Paul von 838

Hasselbach, Hans-Karl von (H’s doctor) 515, 870
Hassell, Ulrich von 350, 352, 498, 541, 820

Haug, Jenny 218

Haus Wachenfeld, Obersalzberg 177, 218, 222, 327 see also Berghof
Haus Wahnfried, Bayreuth 490-91

Haushofer, Albrecht 617

Haushofer, Karl 98, 154, 617

Hausler, Rudolf 46, 48, 49

Havel river 935

Hawaii 656, 657

He 176 (rocket-propelled plane) 490

Hearst press 208

Hefelmann, Hans 532, 533

Heilmann and Littmann (Munich construction firm) 48
Heim, Ferdinand 733

Heine, Heinrich 41, 292

Heinemann, Erich 808

Heines, Edmund 237, 311, 315

Heinkel factory, Rostock 707

Heinrici, Gotthard 891, 911, 920, 927-8
Heisenberg, Werner 874

Held, Heinrich 133, 161-2

Helldorf, Wolf Heinrich Graf von 392, 452, 454, 847
Hendaye 581

Henderson, Sir Nevile:
British Ambassador to Germany 386
meeting with H (March 1938) 407
and Munich Agreement negotiations 440, 442, 443-4
and Polish crisis (1939) 496-7, 500-502, 503, 505-7
and Sudeten crisis (1938) 426, 442, 443-4

Henkel (winemakers) 236

Henlein, Konrad 387, 424, 432-3, 505

Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony and Bavaria 521
Hepp, Ernst 53, 56

Herber, Franz 839
‘Heroes’ Memorial Day’ 704, 744, 798, 822, 910

Herrlingen 875
Hefg, Ilse (née Prohl) 147, 611

Hefs, Rudolf:
and anti-Jewish propaganda 340, 342, 347, 348
besotted with H 98-9, 104, 156
and ‘German Revolution’ 303
heads Political Central Commission 248
and H’s negotiations with Papen 250
imprisonment (1924) 161, 173
installed as Deputy Fuhrer 306, 328, 448
internment in Spandau 616, 965
Ministerial Council for the Defence of the Reich 506
mission to Scotland (May 1941) 610-17
and murder of Strasser 249
and the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ 311
and occupation of France 561
and occupation of Poland 522
and remilitarization of Rhineland 353
as student 97, 98, 154
suicide 965
and Thule Society 82

trial 616
and writing of Mein Kampf 147, 154

Hefg, Wolf Rtidiger 611

Hesse 227, 278, 456, 465-6

Heusinger, Adolf 624, 640-41, 830, 831

Hewel, Walther 477, 492, 500, 504, 593, 922, 943

Heydrich, Reinhard:
and the Anschlufs 413
assassination 713-14, 719
and deportation of Jews 678, 682, 685-6, 687-8, 690, 696
Deputy Reich Protector in Czechoslovakia 685, 691
development of genocidal programme 668-9, 670, 678, 696, 697
expansionist ambitions 448
and Fritsch scandal (1938) 394
head of Bavarian Political Police 278, 279
heads Central Office for Jewish Emigration 464
and invasion of Poland 508
and ‘Jewish Question’ 453-4, 574, 578-9, 593, 594-8
mandate for ‘Final Solution’ 678
and Nazi atrocities in Poland 520-21, 522, 525, 526, 527, 548-9
and November pogrom (1938) 457-8, 459, 462, 464
and Operation Barbarossa 618
proposes badges for Jews 462, 679-80
and Prussian Gestapo 306
and the SD 308

Hiedler (Hittler), Johann Nepomuk 2

Hiedler, Johann Georg 2

Hiedler, Maria Anna (née Schicklgruber; H’s paternal grandmother)
1

Hilger, Gustav 488

Himmler, Heinrich:

agitates against Manstein 797
ambitions to run War Ministry 397

and the Anschlufs 413

appearance 188

appointed leader of SS 189

appointed Reich Minister of the Interior 771

approach to ‘Jewish Question’ 449, 575, 576-7, 578, 594, 596-8
background 188

commander of Munich police 278, 279, 290

Commander of the Reserve Army 835, 845, 859, 860

and Czechoslovakia 430, 448

and defence of Berlin 940

deportation of Jews 596-8, 634, 684-5, 687, 688, 690, 692
Deputy Reich Propaganda leader 189, 192

development of genocidal programme 668-9, 675-6, 688, 689
estrangement from H 891

expansionist ambitions 448-9

expelled from all offices 949

failure as military commander 891, 905, 908, 913-14, 944
‘Final Solution’ 715-17, 764-5, 776-7, 878

and Fritsch scandal (1938) 393-4

in Fiihrer Bunker 902, 923

‘General Plan for the East’ 669

and H’s negotiations with Papen 250, 251

and H’s Reich Chancellery entourage 293

ideological struggle against ‘forces’ 449

and ‘Jewish Question’ 676, 715-17

joins NSDAP 188

and July 1944 assassination attempt 832, 835, 840, 845, 860
leaves Fiithrer Bunker 925

murder of Rohm 189

and Nazi atrocities in Poland 522, 524-5, 526-7

and the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ 312

and November pogrom (1938) 457-8, 465

offer to surrender 943-6, 947, 953

orders total destruction of Warsaw 868

overtures to Britain and America 860, 899

his ‘police state’ xxxviii, 329-30

and Polish crisis (1939) 511

and Prussian Gestapo 306

and putsch attempt (1923) 189

racial selection programme 28

and radicalization of home front 706, 860

reads H’s proclamation (12 November 1944) 880

Reich Commissar for the Consolidation of Germandom 527

rejected by Donitz 961-2

and Russian campaign 650

Settlement Commissar for the East 520

‘Some Thoughts on the Treatment of the Alien Population in the
East’ 576

and Soviet advances in the east 814

and Strasser’s resignation of party offices 248

suicide 963-4

and Total War Effort 856, 858, 859

urges H to leave Fithrer Bunker 929

Volkssturm 858, 860

Hindenburg, Oskar von 252, 309

Hindenburg, Paul von:
and anti-Jewish legislation 288
appoints Schleicher as Reich Chancellor 245
banning of SA and SS 228
and Briining’s resignation 229-30
and ‘Day of Potsdam’ 280
elected Reich President (1925) 165
and fall of Miller administration 199
funeral 318
grants H dissolution of Reichstag 264
and H’s appointment as Chancellor 234-6, 238, 255, 260
illness and death 301, 306-7, 316-17, 940, 950
negotiations with H 242-4, 250, 251-5
Osthilfe scandal 251
and Papen’s appointment as Chancellor 230
and proposed dissolution of Reichstag (1932) 239

Reich’s President election (1932) 224, 226-7, 232
and the Reichswehr 304

and resignation of Papen government 242

and the SA 303, 308, 313

succession issue 301-2, 307, 316-17

as war hero 87, 165, 226

Hitler family tree 4

Hitler, Adolf: birth 3
childhood and schooling 3, 5-10, 39-40
relationship with mother 5, 10, 13-14, 15, 412
relationship with father 8, 9-10, 412
aims to become an artist 9, 10-11, 12, 13-15, 17, 26, 105
friendship with Kubizek 11-12, 18-22, 25-6
infatuation with Stefanie 12-13, 22, 219
first visits Vienna (1906/7) 13-15
rejected by Vienna Academy 14, 19-20, 26
aims to become an architect 15-16, 48, 77, 105
indolent lifestyle in Vienna 16-22
down and out in Vienna 24—5, 29-31
break with Kubizek 26—7
‘political awakening’ in Vienna 27-9, 32, 35-7, 75
sells paintings 31-2, 33-4, 44, 49
avoidance of military service 45-6, 48, 50-51
leaves Vienna for Munich (1913) 45-50
elation at outbreak of First World War 51-2
joins up 52-3
promoted to corporal 53-4
dispatch runner 54-5, 57
awarded Iron Cross 55, 59
wounded at the Somme (1916) 51, 57-8
mustard gas attack 42, 59-60
hospitalization 42, 60, 62-6
returns to Munich after War 68-71
political ‘education’ in Reichswehr 72-5
joins German Workers’ Party 75-8, 83

demobilization 64—5, 70, 76-7

political apprenticeship in Munich 78-81

role in early development of German Workers’ Party 83-9

and growth of NSDAP 93-7, 98-9, 116-17, 118

takes over party leadership (1921) 79, 83-4, 100-104, 108-110

imprisoned for breach of the peace 108, 136

early development of Fuhrer cult 110-113, 119-20

May Day affair (1923) 121-3

putsch attempt (1923) 42, 64, 79, 98, 118-19, 127-32, 133, 138,
455

trial (1924) 48, 133-6, 150-51, 156

imprisonment in Landsberg 112, 132, 136-8, 145-6, 153, 156-60

and proposed merger of NSDAP with DVFP 141-4

early release from prison 144—5, 160-61, 257

writing of Mein Kampf 139, 143, 146-7, 148-55, 166, 177, 180

sees himself as Germany’s coming ‘great leader’ 156-9, 174

refoundation of NSDAP 162-6, 169-70

establishes supreme mastery over the party 169-73, 194-5, 200-
201, 211-15

writing of ‘Second Book’ 180, 183-4

Nazi Party’s ‘wilderness years’ 184—92

and first Nazi experiment in government 197-8

success in 1930 Reichstag elections 202-4, 206, 208-9

and Leipzig Reichswehr trial 206-8, 217

and SA rebellions (1930/31) 216-17

death of Geli Raubal 218-22, 380, 490

acquires German citizenship 226

runs for Reich presidency (1932) 226-7
deal with Schleicher 229-30, 232-3, 238
Hindenburg refuses to appoint as Chancellor 234—6
negotiations with Hindenburg 242-4, 250, 251-5
and Gregor Strasser’s resignation 246-9
appointed Chancellor (30 January 1933) 148, 255-62
government of ‘national concentration’ 260, 263-4
calls for rearmament 265-7

outlines economic policy 268-72

seizure of power throughout Germany 278-90

entourage in the Reich Chancellery 293-4, 324-6, 373-7

withdraws Germany from League of Nations 297-300, 331, 351

crushing of SA leadership 285, 301-16

and death of Hindenburg 301-2, 306-7, 317-19, 322

increasing withdrawal from domestic politics 322-3, 327

development of foreign policy 330-39, 361-4, 368-71, 384-91,
416-23, 470-73

and anti-Jewish legislation 288, 321, 339-49, 382-3, 451-5, 462

remilitarization of Rhineland 349-58, 363, 368-9, 402

Four-Year Plan 364-8, 397, 402, 403

daily routine in Reich Chancellery 374-7

grandiose building plans 379, 381, 650-51, 703, 747, 781

takes over leadership of Wehrmacht 397-400, 422-3

the Anschluf$ 385, 386, 401-16, 420

policy on Czechoslovakia 416-44, 470, 471-6

Munich Agreement (1938) 434-47, 471, 473-4, 479

and November pogrom (1938) 455-69

invasion of Czechoslovakia (March 1939) 476-80

annexation of Memelland 480-81

Polish crisis (Summer 1939) 448, 470-71, 480, 490-507

miscalculation over Poland 481-4

policy shift towards Poland 485-90

invasion of Poland (September 1939) 502-3, 507-9, 516-18

and outbreak of war 510-17

authorizes Nazi atrocities in Poland 518, 521-7, 536, 548-9, 578-
9

Hitler, Adolf —

and ‘euthanasia action’ programme 528-35, 548
opening of Western Front 537-41, 547-8, 550-51, 554-6
‘peace offers’ (October 1939) 517, 539-40, 617;
(July 1940) 564-6, 617
assassination attempt (November 1939) 537, 544-7
launch of Scandinavian campaign 552-4

and Dunkirk evacuation 557-9

tours occupied France 560-62

proposed invasion of Britain 562-5, 567-71, 592

opening of Eastern Front 565-6, 567-9, 578-9, 583-91, 597-603,
609-10, 615-16, 618-21

Balkan strategy 603-5, 607-10, 648

and Hefs affair 610-17

invasion of Soviet Union (June 1941) 622-4, 626-35

life in the Wolf’s Lair 624-6, 635, 700-701, 720, 741-2, 748,
781-2

plans for ‘New Order’ 632-5, 650-51, 654, 775

drive for Moscow and Leningrad 635-51

army’s winter crisis on Eastern Front (1941-42) 645-6, 647, 651-
6, 661-7, 693, 700, 704, 710

declaration of war against United States (December 1941) 657-
60, 690, 693-4

takes over supreme command of army 664, 783

and development of genocidal policy 459, 468-9, 594-8, 668-9,
676-7, 682-5, 688-9, 691-5, 697-9, 714-17, 763-5, 775-7,
802-3, 969

radicalization of home front 705-9, 715, 744, 749-50, 854-7

spring/summer offensive (1942) 700, 710-13, 719-26

and the battle for Stalingrad 648, 727, 728-9, 731, 733-6, 737-44

the move to ‘total war’ 745-7, 749-54, 808-10, 855-60

last German offensive in the east (Operation Citadel; July 1943)
759-6, 762-3, 766-7, 769-70, 771-2, 774-5, 787-9, 797-8

and capitulation of Italy 761-2, 763, 767-70, 771-4

preparation for Allied invasion in the West 785-6, 793, 803-4

invasion of Hungary (March 1944) 793-6

D-Day (6 June 1944) 804-6

and Allied advances 806-10, 813, 861-7

and Red Army offensive in the east 810-11, 813-14, 867-8, 879,

888-92, 894-6, 905, 908, 914, 918

July 1944 assassination plot 816-18, 828-53, 865, 875

Ardennes offensive 873, 875, 879, 880-87, 892

refuses to capitulate 895-900, 906-20, 954

and Red Army advance on Berlin 920-21, 923-5, 926-7, 928,
931, 934-42, 946, 952, 953-4

last days in the Fuhrer Bunker 901-4 922-6, 928-31, 938-43,
951-5

rage at Himmler’s offer to surrender to Allies 943-6, 947, 953

marriage 947-8

his last Will and Testament 948-50

suicide 929, 932, 951-2, 953-5

disposal of body 23, 932, 954, 956-8

announcement of his death 959

Character & characteristics: acting ability 174-5, 213-14, 273,
373, 615, 932

ageing 710, 747, 754, 782, 849, 905-6, 923

anti-communism 35, 41, 208, 599

anti-Habsburg feelings 9, 27, 47

anti-Marxism 91, 92-3

antisemitism see below

appearance 8, 12, 14, 25, 31, 34, 35, 55, 116, 174, 175-6, 710,
754, 902-3

attitude towards women 12-13, 22-3, 55, 175, 212, 218-19, 325,
378

autodidacticism xxvii, 27

aversion to alcohol 25, 55, 160, 212, 496

bohemianism 210, 375

carries dog-whip 115-16

‘charismatic authority’ xxviii—xxix, xxxviii, 900

charm 373, 378

chaste lifestyle 22, 212

cleanliness fetishism 34

diet 25, 160, 212, 380, 625, 720, 781, 850, 871

egocentrism/egomania xxxix-xl, 20, 27, 157, 175, 356, 378, 380,
783

emptiness of private life 209-10, 211, 221, 701, 747

fantasist 12-13, 17, 20, 26, 747

foppishness 12, 25

‘genius’ 210, 356, 372, 607, 609, 710, 781, 782-4

health 380, 639-40, 654, 667, 741, 744, 747, 782, 793, 798, 849,
857, 869-71, 880-81

hesitancy 213, 653, 752, 754, 783

histrionics 102, 725

hubris 356

hypochondria 214, 380, 640, 870, 871

idealism 89

ideologue xxxv, xl, 79-80, 96, 148-9, 158, 610

idleness 10, 20, 26, 31, 32, 175, 212, 781

immunized to human suffering 53, 56, 701

impatience 121, 129

insomnia 798

intelligence xxxvi, 176, 210, 336

isolation 701-2

leadership style 211-15, 269, 321-9, 374-5, 491-2, 751-2, 782-3

love of films 293, 325, 377, 430, 781

love of music 11, 12, 19, 20-21, 25, 490, 701, 709-10, 742, 781

magnetism 209-10

medication 869, 870, 902, 923, 928

megalomania 378, 379, 485, 610

messianism 850-51

military leadership 554, 710, 722, 754, 779-81, 783-4, 786-9,
797, 811-13, 882-3, 893

obsession with the grandiose 22, 212, 379, 650-51

opinionatedness 26-7

pan-German nationalism 36, 40, 47, 70, 151, 401

paranoia 849-50, 871, 952

political skill xxxvi, 84, 210, 263, 336

preoccupation with his own mortality 379-80, 880-81

problems with personal relationships 24, 49, 55-6, 116, 211, 373-
4, 378, 701

propagandist 79-80, 96-7, 105-6, 108-9, 158, 188-9, 326, 335,
936

prudishness 22, 23-4, 375, 392-3

psychiatric abnormality 871

as public speaker see below

rages 20, 22, 27, 35, 102, 210-11, 310-11, 384, 724, 725, 747,
782, 850, 890, 926-7

reading 38, 49, 54, 97, 145, 154

recklessness 371, 722, 812

religion 373, 382

restlessness 371

routine 375-7, 430-31, 491-2, 700-701

secrecy xxxvii, 20, 335, 373, 691, 716-17

self-deception 780-81

sense of infallibility 294, 356, 422

as sex symbol xxxix

sexuality xxxix, 22-4, 115, 175, 219

suicidal tendencies xxxix—xl, 132, 134, 887

suspicion 850

talkativeness 742

unathleticism 325, 380

vegetarianism 160, 212, 214, 380, 625, 720

wit 175, 176

‘world view’/Weltanschauung 27, 37, 42, 44-5, 75, 80-81, 145-6,
148-55, 158, 184, 321, 330, 367

Antisemitism:

anti-Jewish legislation 288, 321, 339-49, 382-3, 451-5, 462

associates Jews with uncleanliness and disease 38

associates war with destruction of Jews 593-4, 692-3

attacks Jewish lack of ability and creativity 692

badges for Jews 462, 679-81

becomes obsessive antisemite 37—45, 91-2

biological terminology 677, 759, 764, 790

development of genocidal policy 459, 468-9, 594-8, 668-9, 676-
7, 682-5, 688-9, 691-5, 697-9, 714-17, 763-5, 775-7, 969

emergence of hatred of Jews 27-9, 32, 40, 44-5

examines relation of Marxism to Jews 38, 49

first known statements on 29, 74—5

fused with anti-Bolshevism 150-51

his last Testament 948-9

impact of Crystal Night 466-9

influence of First World War 41-2, 56-7, 58, 62-5, 691, 692

keen to hide involvement in genocide 691

links destruction of Jews with acquisition of ‘living space’ 154-5

and November pogrom (1938) 455-69

pressurizes Axis leaders 759-60

‘prophesies’ destruction of Jews 469, 669, 671, 680-81, 692, 693-
4, 697-8, 716-17, 728, 731, 764, 802

in public speeches 74, 80, 87, 90, 91-2, 179-80, 202, 358, 381,
469, 592-3, 691, 693-5, 697-8, 728, 731, 790, 802-3, 885, 899

Public speaker:

acting ability 174

Anton Drexler on 75

appeal to younger generation 203

Hitler, Adolf

banning of 166, 179, 184-5, 187
conviction politician 182-3
declining impact 731, 744, 748, 784, 790, 798-9, 906-7
demagogic skills xxvii
discovers his greatest talent 74, 77-8
excited by crowds 80, 209, 221, 380-81, 592
Hans Frank on 88-9
his notes and preparation 90, 91, 326
idealism 203-4
Karl Harrer’s assessment of 85
Karl Mayr on 94
Kurt Ltidecke on 114
language 86, 89
leadership 112
mob-orator 78, 105-6
passion 89, 90-91, 114
personality and leadership 181
perspiration 176
as propagandist 78-80, 105-6, 113, 137-8

pseudo-religious terms 264-5
radio broadcasts 264-5, 279, 353, 406, 507, 731, 748, 773, 784,
789-90, 885, 898-9
repetition 80, 91
simplicity 80, 81, 89
sincerity 89, 114, 381
themes 90-91
William Shirer on 354, 440-41, 486
Works:
Mein Kampf:
antisemitism 37-9, 148, 381, 467
Bavarian revolutionary period 69
censorship of 386
early development of German Workers’ Party 83-4
early years 3, 5, 6, 9, 10, 13, 14
eastern colonization 180
First World War service 54, 57
future leader in waiting 105
genocidal terminology 149-50
gratitude to Streicher 110
‘heroic’ leader ideas 157-8
H’s ‘mission’ 514
inaccuracies 3, 24, 31, 36
joining German Workers’ Party 76
‘living space’ 64, 148
mother’s death 15
pan-Germanism 402
‘political awakening’ in Vienna 27, 36-7
political life in Munich 50
programme of cooperation with England 614
prostitution 24
role of the state 329
sexual development 23
social-Darwinism 365
South Tyrol question 183
sterilization policy 530

success of 146, 147-8, 225, 327

title 147

volkisch movement 81

‘world view’ Weltanschauung 42, 64, 70, 146, 148-55
writing of 139, 143, 146-7, 166, 177, 180

‘Second Book’ 180, 183-4, 365

Volkischer Beobachter articles 97, 99, 162, 180, 217, 225
Views & biographies on xxxiii—xxxviii

Hitler, Alois (Aloys; H’s father):
birth 1
career as customs officer 1, 2, 3
changes name from Schicklgruber 1-2
death 10
his ‘cosmopolitan views’ 39
H’s inheritance from 45
as husband and father 2, 3, 5, 7
marriages 2-3
relationship with H 8, 9-10, 412
Hitler, Alois (H’s half-brother) 2, 3, 8
Hitler, Angela (H’s half-sister) see Hammitzsch, Angela
Hitler, Anna (née Glasserl) 2
Hitler, Edmund (H’s brother) 3, 5, 8
Hitler, Franziska (née Matzelberger; ‘Fanni’) 2
Hitler, Gustav (H’s brother) 3
Hitler, Ida (H’s sister) 3
Hitler, Klara (née Polzl; H’s mother):
appearance and character 5
death 10, 15, 16
illness 14
marriage to Alois 2-3, 5-6
relationship with H 5, 10, 13-14, 15, 412
widowed 10
Hitler, Otto (H’s brother) 3
Hitler, Paula (H’s sister) see Wolf, Paula

Hitler Youth:
and the Anschlufg 413
antisemitic indoctrination and violence 340, 674
and Fritsch scandal (1938) 395, 396
last days in Berlin 923, 934
Nuremberg rallies 194
Schirach leads 191

and Werwolf 917
working-class support of 206

Hitler, Adolf

‘Hitler-Mutti’ 99, 116

‘Hitler-Oaks and -Linden’ 292

Hobbes, Thomas 421

Hodges, Courtney H. 893

Hoepner, Erich 602-3, 656, 666, 706, 708, 834-5, 839, 840, 846,
847

Hofacker, Casar von 875

Hoffmann, Heinrich:
as ‘court’ photographer 211, 293
and Eva Braun 219, 378
his photographs 52, 144
and H’s paintings 49
and H’s relations with women 218-19
Hoffmann, Henrietta 218
Hofmann, Hermine 99
Holland see Netherlands
Holste, Rudolf 939, 940, 953

Homer 166
homosexuality 23, 24, 29, 216, 315, 394

Honisch, Karl 35, 41

Hoppner, Rolf-Heinz 678, 681-2

Horthy de Nagybanya, Miklos 607, 758, 760, 794-5, 876-7
Horthy de Nagybanya, Miklos (son) 877

Hofsb, Rudolf 688, 965

Hofsbach, Friedrich 334-5, 375, 388, 394-5, 486, 890
‘Hofbach meeting’ (November 1937) 387-91, 418

Hoth, Hermann 672, 734, 735

Hube, Hans Valentin 796
Huber, Kurt 741
Huemer, Eduard 8—9

Hugenberg, Alfred:
his press 193, 196
H’s ‘compromise’ with 940
and H’s negotiations with Hindenburg 252, 253, 254-5
Minister of Economics and Food in H’s cabinet 260, 263-4, 267-8,
270
and ‘National Opposition’ 222-3
and Pan-German League 153
and ‘Reich Committee for the German People’s Petition’ 193
and Reich’s President election (1932) 226
resignation from H’s cabinet 289-90
Humber estuary 770-71
Hungarian army 591, 729, 738, 742
Hungary:
Arrow Cross 876, 877-8
changes sides 876-7
and Czechoslovakia 423, 437
German invasion (March 1944) 793-6
German troops withdraw 918
joins Tripartite Pact 604
seeks peace with Soviet Union 867-8, 876
Soviet interest in 585, 876
Soviet invasion (January 1945) 889, 890, 914, 928
territorial dispute with Romania 867
treatment of Jews 758, 795-6, 878
unwilling to align with Germany 487
vital raw materials 862, 876, 889, 898, 914

Huttler (Hiedler), Johann Nepomuk 2
Huttler (Hiedler), Walburga 2
hyperinflation 108, 114, 125

Ibiza 384
IG-Farben (chemical company) 361, 365, 366, 368, 451
Illustrierter Beobachter (newspaper) 225
imperialism:

H’s views on colonies 650, 713

and ‘living space’ 153-4

and ‘national community’ 182
Independent Social Democrats (USPD) 66-7, 69
India 389, 580, 583, 585, 629, 630, 631
Indo-China 579
Innitzer, Theodor 413
Innsbruck 961

intellectuals:
Jewish ‘intelligentsia’ targeted 670
planned liquidation of ‘Bolshevik intelligentsia’ 598-9
purging and capitulation of German intellectuals 291-2

International Automobile and Motor-Cycle Exhibition (Berlin, 1933)
271

internationalism:
H’s views on 56, 64, 119, 202
of Social Democrats 36

Iran 485, 723

Iraq 485, 723

Ireland, Republic of 485

iron 366, 403, 487, 551, 630, 713
‘Tron Fist’ club 94

Israel 965

Italian army 733, 738, 742

Italy:
Abyssinian conflict 338-9, 350, 352, 369, 401-2
alliance with Germany 151, 169, 369-70, 402, 403, 471, 733

Allied landing and advances 767, 769, 771, 772-3, 803, 862-3,
892

and the Anschlufs 401, 402, 403, 407

armistice with Allies (3 September 1943) 771, 772

and Austrian putsch attempt (1934) 317

coup d’etat (1922) 110

and Czechoslovakia 423-4, 425-6, 433, 443-4

Duce cult 110

entry into war 560

fall of Mussolini 761-2, 763, 767-70

Fascist Grand Council 768

and Geneva Disarmament Conference 297-8

and German expansionism 389

and German rearmament 336

invasion of Greece 581, 583, 591, 604, 608

Italian-French armistice (24 June 1940) 561

junior partner in Axis 385, 560

North African campaigns 591, 736, 757, 761

‘Pact of Steel’ (1939) 487

planned invasion of Malta 717

‘Repubblica di Salo’ 774

Russian campaign 729, 736

South Tyrol question 183, 426

and Spanish Civil War 369, 385

treatment of Jews 775-6

Tripartite Pact (1940) 580 see also Fascism

J. A. Topf and Sons 687
‘January Strike’ (1918) 66-7

Japan:
Anti-Comintern Pact (1936) 369, 370-71
attack on Pearl Harbor (December 1941) 607, 656-8, 660, 690,
693-4
attempts to broker peace settlement between Germany and Soviet
Union 871-2

invasion of Singapore 606, 704
navy 338, 712
and Russia 361, 580
territorial ambitions 579-80
Tripartite Pact (1940) 580, 658
war against China 385
Jarres, Karl 165
Jeckeln, Friedrich 689, 690
Jerusalem 965
Jeschonnek, Hans 734, 735, 753
Jesuits 35-6, 41, 824
‘Jewish Question’:
and aim to defeat Soviet Union 682-3, 684, 690
and capitalism 92
Goebbels and 347, 381, 452-5, 577-8, 679, 694, 698-9, 759-60,
763-4
Goring and 450, 461, 464, 575, 598, 678, 679
H associates war with destruction of Jews 593-4, 692-3
H distances himself from 451, 466, 716-17
H shows little active interest 381, 382-3
H uses to put pressure on Axis leaders 759-60
Himmler and 676, 715-17
H’s first recorded written statement on 29, 74-5, 383
and H’s foreign policy 151
and ‘living space’ 182, 575
‘Madagascar solution’ 453, 576-8, 593, 594, 677
in Mein Kampf 38, 154
and morale of lower middle classes 341
and Nazi Party Programme 343-9
‘rational’ systematic approach 458, 464
SS and 416, 452, 458, 464, 467-9, 573, 577, 578-9, 759
Jews:

alleged sexual abuse 91, 109
anti-Jewish legislation 288, 321, 341, 342-9, 382-3, 450-52, 462

‘aryanization’ of Jewish businesses 383, 450, 451, 463

badges for 462, 679-81

ban on attending markets 679

and Bolshevism 66, 91, 146, 148, 150-52, 155, 363, 381, 593,
597-8, 672-3, 899, 907

boycott of Jewish businesses 285-8, 339-40, 341

businessmen removed from representative positions 269

and capitalism 73, 81, 92, 150

and Christianity 692

Crystal Night (9-10 November 1938) 449-50, 454, 457-60, 462-
7, 679

development of Nazi genocidal policy 459, 468-9, 524—7, 572-9,
594-8, 618, 668-99, 714-17, 775-7, 802-3, 969

dismissal of Jewish employees 269, 288

emigration 453, 462, 463, 464, 468

exclusion from civil service and professions 287-8, 450, 451

and First World War 58, 61, 691, 692

H associates with uncleanliness and disease 38

H associates war with destruction of Jews 593-4, 692-3

H links destruction of Jews with acquisition of ‘living space’ 154—
5

Himmler’s ‘ideological struggle’ against 449

Jewish boycott of German goods 285-6

‘Jewish world conspiracy’ 150, 453, 467, 693, 763-4, 885, 899

linked with prostitution 24, 38, 43

‘Madagascar solution’ 453, 576-8, 593, 594, 677

and Marxism 38, 49, 64, 150-51, 449

November pogrom (1938) 455-69

Nuremberg Laws 339, 342, 344-9

Ostjuden 92

reaction to H’s appointment as Chancellor 259, 340

‘removal of’ 75, 80, 91-2, 149-50, 157-8, 323, 339, 346, 451,
549, 694-5

ritual murder charge 41, 42

sexual relations and intermarriage with non-Jews 42, 342-3, 345-
6

and Social Democracy 38, 64

synagogues destroyed 450-51, 456, 457, 458, 459-60, 465, 523

terror waves against: (1933) 273, 285, 302-3;

(1935) 339-41;

(1938) 383, 415, 449-51, 455-69

treatment in Austria after Anschluf$ 415-16, 450 see also
antisemitism; ‘Final Solution’; Hitler, Adolf, antisemitism; and
under individual countries

Joachimsen, Paul 93

Jodl, Alfred:
and Allied invasion and advances 805, 807, 813, 862, 863
anticipates H’s wishes 914
Ardennes offensive 875, 879, 881, 882
and Balkan campaign 605
and battle for Stalingrad 728, 729
dissuades H from scrapping Geneva convention 905
and drive for Moscow 640-41, 643
in Fiihrer Bunker 923, 928-9
in Fuhrer Headquarters 556, 624-5, 655, 786
and German surrender 962
and invasion of Czechoslovakia 391, 425, 427
and July 1944 assassination attempt 832
last days of Wehrmacht High Command 937, 940, 942, 946, 953
loyalty to H 900
and Mediterranean campaign 592
and North African campaign 756
and opening of Eastern Front 566, 567-8, 579, 583, 587
and Operation Barbarossa 597, 609, 638
and Operation Citadel 766
and proposals to end war 897
and restructuring of Wehrmacht 398, 422
and summer offensive (1942) 724-6
at talks with Mussolini (May 1942) 710
trial and execution 964
and winter crisis on Eastern Front (1941-2) 662

Johannmeier, Willi 952

July assassination plot (1944) 816-18, 828-53, 865, 875
Jung, Edgar 312

Junge, Traudl 926, 929, 948, 950-51, 954, 955, 960
Juno Beach 805

Kaether, Ernst 934

Kahr, Gustav Ritter von:
appointed General State Commissar 124—5
counter-revolutionary regime 106, 107, 108
first encounters H 98-9
murdered 98, 312
ousted from power 133
and putsch attempt (1923) 98, 128-9, 130, 133, 134, 135

Kalisz 890
Kaltenbrunner, Ernst 795, 845, 890, 896, 902, 923, 925, 964

Kampfbund des gewerblichen Mittelstandes (Fighting League of the
Commercial Middle Class) 285, 286

Kampfverband Niederbayern 120
Kampfverlag 200, 201

Kannenberg, Arthur 374, 375

Kapp Putsch (1920) 93, 95, 98, 106, 117, 121, 170
Kapp, Wolfgang 93-4

Karlsbad (Karlovy Vary) 424, 432, 433
Karlshorst 963

Karnau, Hermann 957

Kassel 456

Kattowitz 574

Katyn Forest 759

Kaulbach, Wilhelm von 376

Kazakhstan 683

Keitel, Wilhelm:
agitates against Manstein 797
and Allied invasion 807
and the Anschlufg 404, 405, 408, 411
and Balkan campaign 605
and Blomberg scandal (1938) 392, 397
in ‘Committee of Three’ 750, 754
compliancy 754
in ‘Court of Honour’ 844
and defence of Berlin 940, 942, 946, 953
and development of genocidal programme 672, 676
dissuades H from scrapping Geneva convention 905
and drive for Moscow 643
dubbed the ‘Reich Garage Attendant’ 914
in Fiihrer Bunker 923, 924, 928, 930, 931
in Fuhrer Headquarters 556, 624, 655
and Halder 664
H’s last letter to 952-3
and invasion of Czechoslovakia 425, 426-7, 476, 477
and invasion of Poland 502, 503, 520, 522
and invasion of Soviet Union 600
and ‘Jewish Question’ 593, 597
and July 1944 assassination attempt 829-30, 832, 834, 875
loyalty to H 900
Ministerial Council for the Defence of the Reich 506
and occupation of France 561, 562
and opening of Eastern Front 566, 583, 590
and opening of Western Front 543
and plans for ‘New Order’ 633
and restructuring of Wehrmacht 397, 398, 422
retained by Donitz 962
signs German surrender 963
and Soviet advances in the east 814
and summer offensive (1942) 726

at talks with Mussolini (May 1942) 710
trial and execution 964
in Wolf’s Lair 624, 625
Kempka, Erich 375, 821, 954, 956, 957
‘Keppler Circle’ 243, 249
Keppler, Wilhelm 242-3, 249-50, 386, 412
Kerch peninsula 666, 710, 711-12, 713
Kerch, Straits of 772
Kesselring, Albert:
and Allied advances in the west 915
command of Luftwaffe in Mediterranean 664, 726
and German surrender 961
in Italy 787
and North African campaign 756-7
replaces Rundstedt 892
responsibility for southern zone of Reich 919
sees H for last time 919
Ketzin 935
Kharkhov 637, 638, 641, 644, 712, 713, 718, 754-5, 757
Kiel 704
Kielce 894
Kiev:
battle of 632, 643-4, 648
execution of Jews 674-5
Himmler’s impressions 650
plans to take 591, 628, 641, 642-3
recaptured 774
King Kong (film) 293
Kirdorf, Emil 187, 194
Kirkpatrick, (Sir) Ivone 440, 611-12, 616
‘Kirschkern’ Programme 791-2
Klausener, Erich 315

Kleist, Ewald Heinrich von 828
Kleist, Heinrich von 61
Kleist, Paul Ludwig Ewald von 654, 655-6, 797
Kleist-Schmenzin, Ewald von 828
Klessheim Castle 710, 757-8, 794, 795, 799
Klimt, Gustav 23
Klintzsch, Johann 98
Kluge, Giinther von:
and Operation Citadel 755-6, 767, 769-70, 772
and opposition groups 821, 824-5, 836
replaced by Busch 825
replaces Rundstedt 813, 861, 863
suicide 864-6
and summer offensive (1942) 723
urges H to end war 851
and winter crisis on Eastern Front (1941-42) 662, 663, 666-7
Knappertsbusch, Hans 709-10, 799
Koblenz 892, 893
Koch, Erich 534-5, 634-5, 859, 905, 965
Koch, Robert 677
Koeppen, Werner 650, 684
Kolberg 908, 914
Kolberg (film) 858, 908
Koller, Karl 800, 924, 926-7, 928, 930, 932-3, 938

Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (KPD):
Elser’s support for 545
and emergency decree 276
and Enabling Act (1933) 263, 281
H’s intention to annihilate 208
newspapers and meeting banned 273
Reich’s President election (1932) 226-7

Reichstag elections 178, 204-5, 232, 241-2, 277
and Reichstag fire (1933) 275

streetfights with SA 230-31

and vote of no confidence in government 240
Wohrden incident 191

Konev, Ivan 888, 920, 927, 934, 935

Konigsberg 277, 414, 498, 879, 892, 914, 918

Konigsbronn 545

Konigswusterhausen 927

Konstanz 546

Koppe, Wilhelm 527, 535, 575, 965

Kordt, Erich 536, 542

Kordt Theo 536

Korherr, Richard 716, 759

Korner, Theodor 745

Korten, Giinther 814

Kowno 481, 626, 670-71, 689

KPD see Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands

Krampnitz 930

Krauch, Karl 361

Krause, Karl 375

Krebs, Albert 214

Krebs, Hans 915, 923, 927, 928, 931, 938, 939, 940, 942, 950, 952,
954, 958-9, 960

Kreisau Circle 823-4, 846

Kreyssig, Lothar 529

Kriebel, Hermann 120, 124, 126, 134, 135

Kronstadt 636

Kruger, Else 960

Krupp (iron and steel/armaments company) 153, 193, 268, 451
Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, Gustav 268, 269
Kuban river 722, 772
Kube, Wilhelm 635, 689-90
Kubizek, August (‘Gustl’):

friendship with H 11-12, 26-7, 904

and H’s antisemitism 39, 40

and H’s attitude to sex 22, 23-4

memoirs 11, 23, 26-7, 34

moves to Vienna with H 18-22, 25

reunions with H 373, 491, 567

Ktichler, Georg von 602-3

Kunz, Helmut Gustav 960

Kurhessen 457

Kursk 719, 755, 766, 769

Kiistrin bridgehead 891, 892, 914, 915, 920
Kvaternik, Sladko 677

Kyrill, Prince 117

labour shortages 473, 702, 749, 854, 878
Lake Balaton 890, 914

Lake Ladoga 724

Lambach 490

Lammers, Hans Heinrich:
and Bormann 516, 749
in ‘Committee of Three’ 750, 753
and development of genocidal programme 676
and euthanasia programmes 532
head of Reich Chancellery 293, 324, 376
and Koller 933
Ministerial Council for the Defence of the Reich 506
and occupation of Poland 522

and plans for ‘New Order’ 633
and Total War Effort 855, 856

‘land policy’ (Bodenpolitik) 180
Landespolizei 355

Landsberg am Lech fortress: H imprisoned in 132, 136-8, 145-6,
153

Landtag elections: (1924) 132, 141;
(1929) 192-3, 196-7, 200;
(1931) 222, 227;
(1932) 227-8, 230;
(1933) 284
Landvolk 191
Lange, Herbert 688
Lange, Otto 689, 696
Lanz, Adolf (known as Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels) 28-9, 40
Lanz, Hubert 821
Lattre de Tassigny, Jean de 963
Latvia 487, 499, 622, 677, 689, 889
Laubock, Theodor 99
Laval, Pierre 581-2, 582-3, 732, 758
‘Law against the Enslavement of the German People’ (1929) 193
‘Law against the New Construction of Parties’ (1933) 290
‘Law for the Emergency Defence of the State’ (1934) 314
‘Law on the Head of State of the German Reich’ (1934) 317
‘Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring’ (1933)
294-5
‘Law for Reduction of Unemployment’ (1933) 270

‘Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service’ (1933)
288, 291

‘Law to Protect German Blood’ (1935) 344-6

leadership cult see Fuhrer cult

League of Nations:
and Abyssinian crisis 339, 349
condemnation of Germany 338
control of Saarland 332
German withdrawal (1933) 297-300, 331, 351
H’s offer for Germany to rejoin 353, 354
and Polish crisis (1939) 494

Lebensraum see ‘living space’

Lechfeld camp 73-4, 77

Leeb, Wilhelm Ritter von 544, 590, 622, 636-7, 666, 819
Léger, Alexis 444

Lehar, Franz 20

Lehmann, Julius F. 81-2, 116

Leibstandarte-SS Adolf Hitler (H’s houseguards) 309, 310, 375, 377,
913

Leipa 478

Leipart, Theodor 288

Leipzig 81, 858, 893
Gewandhaus 709

Leipzig Reichswehr trial (1930) 206-8, 217

Leipzig University Children’s Clinic 532

Leitgen, Alfred 612

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich 49

Leningrad 590, 591, 622, 628, 636-7, 638-9, 641, 642, 644, 700,
724

Leonding 7, 8, 412

Leopold III, King of the Belgians 557

Leopold, Josef 406

Leuna 893

Ley, Robert 246, 247, 288, 289, 328, 593, 750-51, 752, 900, 964
Libau (Liepaja) 499
Libya 591, 717, 730, 736
Lidice 714
Liége 554
Lille 53
Lindemann, Georg 814
Lindloff, Ewald 957-8
Linge, Heinz 715, 832, 902, 903, 922, 923, 943, 955, 956-7, 960
Linz:
anti-Habsburg feelings 9
arrival of American troops (7 May 1945) 961
H visits (1939) 491
as H’s ‘home town’ 7
H’s speech in (1938) 411-12
H’s youth in 10-13, 491
military authorities 48, 49, 50-51
model of 903-4
nationalism in 9, 39-40
rebuilding plans 856, 903
Urfahr 14, 16-17
workers’ flats 490

Lippe-Detmold 250-51
Lippert, Michael 312
Lipski, Jézef 331, 481, 482, 507
List, Wilhelm 721-2, 723, 724-5
Liszt, Franz 20, 626
Lithuania 384, 481, 517, 595, 622, 670-71, 677, 689, 814
Litvinov, Maxim 488
‘living space’:
for agricultural production 388-9

development of notion of 80, 91, 146, 152-5
and Four-Year Plan 367
and ‘Germanization’ in the east 265, 712-13
Haushofer’s influence 617
in H’s public statements 180, 183, 202
and invasion of Czechoslovakia 418, 427, 479
and invasion of Poland 486, 524
and ‘Jewish Question’ 182
in Mein Kampf 64, 148, 153-5, 157
and Russia 146, 152-5, 158, 180, 182, 362, 566, 631, 634 see also
eastern expansion; expansionism
Lloyd George, David (later 1st Earl Lloyd-George of Dwyfor) 565
Lob, Fritz 361
Locarno Treaty (1925) 182, 337, 350-51, 352, 354
Lodz (Litzmannstadt) 526, 575, 685, 686, 688, 890
Loffner, Siegfried 33, 41
Lohse, Hinrich 246, 635, 689-90, 695, 965
London:
Blitz 570
V1 flying-bomb attacks 803, 806-7
V2 rocket attacks 873, 881
World Economic Conference (1933) 290
Lorenz, Heinz 836, 922, 943, 952
Loringhoven, Bernd von 952
Lorraine 578
Losener, Bernhard 344, 345
Lo&berg, Bernard von 567-8
Lossow, Otto Hermann von:
on H as propagandist 137-8
and May Day affair (1923) 122
ousted from power 133
and putsch attempt (1923) 128-9, 130, 133, 134, 135

Rohm and 120
in ruling triumvirate 126-7, 130

Ltibeck 196, 278, 945
Lublin 574, 575, 576, 688, 697
Liidecke, Kurt 113-14, 117, 163

Ludendorff, Erich:
alleged freemasonry 165
anti-clericalism 161
at Nuremberg rally (1923) 123-4
candidate for the Reich Presidency (1925) 165-6
and expansionism 153
and Frontbann 143
funding of 117
H’s conflicts with 156, 161, 162, 163
and H’s refounding of NSDAP 163
as potential military leader of Germany 137, 138
and putsch attempt (1923) 129-30, 131, 133, 134-5
radical volkisch nationalism 121
visits H in Landsberg 142
and Volkischer Block 144
as war hero 87, 114, 121

Ludin, Hanns 207, 208

Ludwig Ferdinand, Prince of Bavaria 124

Ludwig III, King of Bavaria 52

Ludwigshafen 893

Lueger, Karl 32, 37, 42

Luftwaffe:
aircraft production 791, 799-801, 808, 874
and Allied bombing raids 718, 752-3, 762, 790, 851
Ardennes offensive 880, 885
Balkan campaign 604, 605, 607
battle for Stalingrad 734, 735, 737, 738
bomb-proof bunkers 799-800

and D-Day landings 806
defence of Berlin 926-7, 946
deficiencies of 733, 738, 752, 880, 887
Dunkirk 557, 558-9
end of 885, 886, 926-7
equipping of 387, 550, 791, 799-801
flawed communications with Wehrmacht 553-4
Goring announces existence of 334
Goring’s leadership 641, 718, 752-3, 762, 768, 790-91, 797
and IG-Farben lobby 365
and invasion of Czechoslovakia 477
‘Kirschkern’ Programme 791-2
Mediterranean campaign 664, 730, 733
and proposed invasion of Britain 563, 565, 568, 569-70
restructuring of (1938) 398
Russian campaign 619, 637, 649, 767
size of 337
Luitpoldhain 241
Liineburg 964
Luther, Hans 267
Luther, Martin 157, 163, 181
Lutze, Viktor 305, 309, 313, 315, 760
Luxembourg 557

Luzk 670

McLean, Donald 611

‘Madagascar solution’ 453, 576-8, 593, 594, 677
Magdeburg 454, 457, 893, 958

Maginot Line 538, 559

Magnuszev bridgehead 888

Main river 914

Mainz 893, 894

Maisel, Ernst 875

Majdanek concentration and extermination camp 262, 715
male fantasy 106

Malicious Practices Act (1933) 279

Malta 608, 717

Manchester Guardian 968

manganese 775, 787, 862

Manicheism 148, 763

Mannerheim, Baron Carl Gustav von 718, 868
Mannesmann (corporation) 451

Mansfeld, Erich 967

Manstein, Erich von:
11th Army 710
and battle for Stalingrad 734-6, 738
chief of staff of Army Group A 554, 664
and development of genocidal programme 673
dismissal 796-7
and invasion of Czechoslovakia 429
moved to Stettin 555
and Operation Citadel 755-6, 767, 770, 772, 774, 787-9
rejects approach by opposition groups 824
and retaking of Kharkhov 754-5, 757
and spring/summer offensive (1942) 717, 718, 719, 724
and taking of Sevastopol 718, 719
‘Manstein plan’ 554-5
Manteuffel, Hasso von 881, 883, 884
Manziarly, Constanze 926, 929, 954
Marburg, University of 307
‘March Fallen’ (Marzgefallene) 291
Margival (Fithrer Headquarters) 807

Marita, Operation 604, 607-10

Market Garden, Operation 866-7
Marne river 866

Marseilles 866

Marx, Karl xxxiii, 49, 145

Marxism:
H’s attacks on 91, 119, 138, 178, 262, 264, 268, 270, 272
Jews and 38, 49, 64, 150-51, 449
Marxist press 38
and National Socialist movement 50 see also anti-Marxism

Marzahn 926

Marzgefallene (“March Fallen’) 291
‘master race’ 148, 632

masturbation 23

Matsuoka, Yosuke 605-7, 657

Maurice, Emil 147, 220, 293

Mauthausen concentration camp 775, 776
May Day affair (1923) 121-3

May, Karl 7, 9

Mayer, Joseph 533

Maykop 653, 711, 722, 723

Mayr, Karl 72-3, 74, 75, 76-7, 93-4
Mayrhofer, Josef 19-20

Me262 (fighter aircraft) 791, 801
Mecklenburg-Schwerin 141, 142, 188, 193, 205, 230, 490, 931
Medicus, Franz Albrecht 344-5

Mediterranean:
‘an Italian sea’ 370, 581
British navy in 571, 580, 733, 766
H’s hopes for strategic gain 591-2

Mefo-Bills 267

Mein Kampf see Hitler, Adolf: Works
Meissner, Otto 234, 252, 264, 313, 324, 477, 505, 925
Memelland 475, 480-81
Mendelssohn, Felix 41
mentally ill patients 528-35, 573
Meran 799
Mercury, Operation 608
Mers-el-Kébir 562
Mertz von Quirnheim, Albrecht Ritter 834, 839, 840, 841, 845
Messerschmitt, Willi 791, 801
Messina, Straits of 771
Metz 807, 865
Meuse river 557, 883
Meyer, Alfred 687-8
Michael, King of the Romanians 867
Mickey Mouse cartoons 377
Mierendorff, Carlo 824
Miklas, Wilhelm 410, 412
Milan 370, 953
Milch, Erhard 408, 737, 791, 792, 800, 801
Ministerial Council for the Defence of the Reich 506, 751, 752
Minsk 622, 626, 627, 676, 687, 690, 811, 821
Mischlinge (part-Jews) 681, 690, 696
Model, Walter:
H’s ‘fireman’ 813
and Operation Citadel 756, 766—7
replaces Busch 813, 814
replaces Kluge 864-5

replaces Manstein 797
in the Ruhr 911, 919

suicide 919
Moeller van den Bruck, Arthur 105
Mogilew 687, 810
Mohnke, Wilhelm 939-40, 946, 954, 960
Mollendorf, Leonhard von 831
Molotov, Vyacheslav 488, 489, 495, 496, 498-9, 583-6, 876
Moltke, Helmuth James Graf von 823-4
Monichkirchen 607, 608

Montgomery, Sir Bernard (later 1st Viscount Montgomery of
Alamein) 727, 730, 772, 865, 893

Montoire 582
Moravia 387, 474, 475, 479, 574

Morell, Theodor (H’s doctor): electrocardiograms 640, 869
in Fiihrer Bunker 923, 926, 928
H’s reliance on 380, 782, 870
and July 1944 assassination attempt 832, 849
questionable treatments 870
revival of President Hacha 477

Morgenthau Plan (1944) 910

Morocco 362, 580, 592

Mortain 864

Moscow 590, 591, 626, 636-41, 644, 646-8, 653-4, 700
motorways (Autobahn) 271-2, 425, 431, 632, 650, 702, 720
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus xxx, 20

Muchow, Reinhold 288

Muhldorf am Inn 411

Miiller, Adolf 221

Miller, Friedrich-Wilhelm 890

Miller, Heinrich 671, 696, 890

Miller, Hermann 191, 199

Miller, Karl Alexander 73, 93

Miller, Ludwig 296

Munchener Beobachter (newspaper) 82
Muinchener Post (newspaper) 99, 136, 220
Munchner Neueste Nachrichten (newspaper) 153

Munich:
Allied bombing of 728, 894
arrival of American troops (30 April 1945) 961
art galleries 45
Artists’ Club 458
beerhalls 77, 79, 81, 96, 126
Bogenhausen 211
bourgeoisie 95, 97, 116
‘Brown House’ 212, 213, 243, 293, 311, 444, 952
Burgerbraukeller 127-30, 136, 137, 163, 171, 456, 544-7, 816
cafés 97-8, 115, 211, 213, 218, 219
deportation of Jews 689
Deutsches Kiinstlerhaus 450-51
Feldherrnhalle 52, 137, 173, 458, 968
during First World War 52, 58, 61, 680
Furstenfelder Hof 82
Hauptbahnhof 69
Herzogpark 160
Hofbrauhaus 84, 85, 86-7, 103, 110, 113, 120, 183, 784, 793,
905, 907
as H’s power base 163, 167
Jewish businesses 450
Konigliche Hof- und Staatsbibliothek 49
Lowenbraukeller 120, 652, 730, 777
military rule (1919) 71-2
November pogrom (1938) 455-8, 465-6
Odeonsplatz 52, 131
Old Town Hall 456, 457, 465
Osteria Bavaria 461, 709

party rallies 119-20, 122, 357
People’s Court 134
‘Rally of German Art’ (1939) 490
Raterepublik 67-8, 69, 70-71, 72, 90, 106, 107, 135
rebuilding plans 856
Schwabing 48
Soldiers’ Councils 66, 68, 69, 70-71
Solln 99
Stadelheim prison 108, 310, 311, 312
Sterneckerbrau 75
synagogues destroyed 450-51, 457, 465
Vier Jahreszeiten hotel 82, 334, 457
volkisch groups 81-2, 84, 95, 121, 132-3, 136
‘White Rose’ group 740-41
Zircus Krone 89, 96, 123, 178
Munich Agreement (1938) 434-47, 471, 473-4, 479-80
Munich Art Academy 45
Munich University 72-3, 77, 191, 741
Munster 918
Minstereifel 556
music 11, 12, 19, 20-21, 160, 626, 701, 709-10, 742, 781, 800
Mussert, Anton 713
Mussolini, Benito:
and the Anschlufg 492, 409, 410
anti-Bolshevism 369
captured and executed 953
coins ‘Axis’ term 370
and Czechoslovakia 425-6, 442-4, 452
fall of 761, 762, 767-8
and German occupation of France 560
and German rearmament 336, 350
and ‘great men’ theory 181
H compared with 78, 110, 112, 176
H loses confidence in 762, 763

and Hefs affair (May 1941) 614

house-arrest 768, 774

H’s bust of 212

invasion of Abyssinia 338-9, 350, 352

invasion of Greece 581, 583, 591, 604, 608
Italianization of South Tyrol 183

‘March on Rome’ (1922) 110, 111, 114

meeting with Franco (February 1941) 592

meeting with Matsuoka (April 1941) 606

misses meeting with H and Laval (November 1942) 732
and Munich Agreement negotiations (1938) 442-4, 445
opens path to the ‘Axis’ 350-51

and Operation Barbarossa 619, 621

and Polish crisis (1939) 497, 502-3, 506

proposed peace terms with Stalin 736

‘Repubblica di Salo’ 774

and Spanish Civil War 362

state visit to Germany (1937) 369, 385

talks with H: (October 1940) 580-81, 582, 583;

(June 1941) 619;

(May 1942) 709-10;

(April 1943) 757;

(July 1943) 767;

(September 1943) 774

virile images of 176

visits H after assassination attempt (July 1944) 829, 839, 841-2

Mutschmann, Martin 905

Nachrichtenabteilung (‘Information Department’) 71-2
Nadolny, Rudolf 297, 332
Naples 772

Napoleon Bonaparte 78, 111, 113, 485, 620, 622, 628, 641, 665,
858

Narev river 517, 888, 889, 894

Narvik 551, 552, 553
National Committee of Free Germany 897

‘national community’ (Volksgemeinschaft) 182, 198, 203-4, 272, 323,
Dar

‘National Day of Celebration of the German People’ (1 May) 358
‘National Redoubt’ 935
‘national renewal’ 514

National Socialism:
‘25 theses’ 86, 171, 172
antisemitism as ‘ideological cement’ 285
characteristics of H’s regime 421-2, 571-3, 738, 746-7, 750, 753,
900, 966-9
comes of its own in war 514-15
Leader as embodiment of ‘idea’ 172, 185, 200-201, 330
and north German NSDAP 167
Strasser’s views 166-7, 200
and volkisch movement 81

National Socialist Doctors’ League 529, 530-31

National Socialist Factory Cell Organization (Nationalsozialistische
Betriebszellenorganisation; NSBO) 288-9

National Socialist Freedom Movement (Nationalsozialistische
Freiheitsbewegung; NSFB) 143-4, 162, 166

National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP; Nazi Party):
attempts to merge with DSP 100-101
banning of 125, 132, 140, 145, 161, 162
benefits from Depression 196-7, 198, 203-4, 257-8
Bormann’s restructuring for peacetime Germany 917-18
chairmanship 95-6, 103-4, 132
corruption 225, 326-7
and Deutscher Kampfbund 124
dominant role in last months of regime 853-4
early mass meetings 87-9, 96-7
and economic crisis of 1929 192-4

factional disputes 186, 200-201

first experiment in government 197-8

Fithrer cult 110-13, 119-20, 185-6, 200, 249

funding of 117-18, 187, 198, 224-5, 241, 269

growth of 94, 99, 109-110, 116-17, 118, 184-5, 186, 191, 194,
198, 291, 327-8

‘Gymnastic and Sports Section’ 88

H establishes supreme mastery 169-73, 194-5, 200-201

H takes over leadership 79, 83-4, 100-104, 108-10

and Hefs affair (May 1941) 613-14

and intellectuals 291-2

membership 162-3, 184, 191, 194, 198, 205-6, 291

in ‘National Opposition’ 223-4

national revolutionary wing 193, 207

north Germany NSDAP (1925) 166-9

and November pogrom (1938) 460

‘Old Fighters’ 731, 784, 847

organization and structure 190, 205-6, 212, 216, 306, 327-9,
448, 917-18

paramilitary organization 106-8, 118, 120-21, 124, 223

Political Central Commission 248

possible coalition with Zentrum 238, 263

Programme of 1920 168, 169, 171, 172, 183, 189, 402, 905, 907

proposed merger with DVFP 141-2, 143

purchases Volkischer Beobachter 95

rallies see under Rallies, Nazi Party

refoundation (1925) 162-6

Reichsleitung 531

Reichstag elections: (1928) 190, 204;

(1930) 198, 201-2, 204-6, 209, 223;

(1932) 230, 231-2, 241-2;

(1933) 277, 300

renamed from DAP 87-8

seizure of power throughout Germany 280-82, 290

socialists leave party 201

state elections (1932) 228, 230

tensions with SA 216-17
‘wilderness years’ 184-91

national-conservative group 823

nationalism:
in Franconia 110
in Linz 9, 39-40
in Munich 82-3
pan-German 22, 37, 39-40, 47, 70, 151, 401
radical mystical 200
of Schonerer movement 22, 39-40

nationalization of the masses 80, 96, 322-3

Nationalsozialistische Betriebszellenorganisation (NSBO; National
Socialist Factory Cell Organization) 288-9

Nationalsozialistische Freiheitsbewegung (NSFB; National Socialist
Freedom Movement) 143-4, 162, 166

Naumann, Werner 872, 950

Nazi Party see National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP)
Nazi Students’ Federation 191

Neisse river 920

Neithardt, Georg 134, 135, 136

Nemmersdorf 879

Netherlands 557, 579, 633, 713, 961

Neudeck (Hindenburg family estate) 251, 306, 308, 317, 318
Neumann, Ernst 475

Neumann, Franz xxxviii

Neumann, Josef 32, 33, 40, 43

Neurath, Konstantin Freiherr von:
and the Anschluf§ 402-3
and ‘Blood Law’ 346
and bombing of the Deutschland (1937) 384
and boycott of Jewish businesses 286

and collapse of Italy 761-2

and German expansionism 388, 390-91

and German withdrawal from League of Nations 298, 299
and H’s Reich Chancellery entourage 293
imprisonment 964-5

and Munich Agreement negotiations (1938) 444
and Polish non-aggression pact (1934) 331

and rearmament 335, 351, 352

remains at Foreign Ministry in H’s cabinet 254
replaced by Ribbentrop (1938) 398

‘retirement’ 685

‘New Order’ 632-5, 650-51, 654, 712-13, 775
New Templar Order 28

Nice 581

Niemoller, Martin 296

Nietzsche, Friedrich 145

‘Night of the Long Knives’ (30 June 1934) 98, 249, 284, 309-16
Nijmegen 866, 892

Nikopol 775, 787, 788

Nile river 718

Nisko 574

NKVD (Soviet Security Police) 759

non-aggression pacts:
Germany and Poland (1934) 298, 331, 483, 486
Germany and Soviet Union (1939) 496, 498-9, 500, 501, 502,
551, 580, 585, 621

Normandy 804, 805-6

North African campaign 591, 717-18, 727, 729-30, 731, 732-3,
736, 756-7, 760-61

North Wind, Operation 884-5

‘Northern Lights’ offensive 724

Norway 487, 551-3, 584, 633, 892, 944

November pogrom (1938) 455-69

NS-Hago (small traders’ organization) 340

NSBO see Nationalsozialistische Betriebszellenorganisation
NSFB see Nationalsozialistische Freiheitsbewegung
nuclear weapons 874

Nuremberg:
Allied bombing of 753, 894
branch of Deutsche Werkgemeinschaft 101, 109
compared with Firth 758
Deutscher Tag (‘German Day’) rally (1923) 123-4
Festhalle 241
Nazi Party rallies 110;
(1927) 174, 184-5;
(1929) 174, 194, 530;
(1933) 304;
(1934) 319;
(1935) 339, 344-5;
(1936) 361, 363, 364, 365, 368;
(1937) 378, 381, 383, 386;
(1938) 432, 434;
(1939; cancelled) 502
Nuremberg International Military Tribunal 616, 964

Nuremberg Laws 339, 342, 344-9

Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH) see German Army High Command
Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW) see Wehrmacht High
Command
Obersalzberg, near Berchtesgaden:
Haus Wachenfeld 177, 218, 222, 327
H’s entourage at 325-6
H’s holidays (1920s) 176-7
H’s rooms 5, 325
H’s stay during summer of 1943 762-3
Platterhof hotel 116, 802 see also Berghof
Oder river 888, 891-2, 904, 908, 914, 920
Odessa 798
Oertzen, Hans Ulrich von 846
Offenbach, Jacques 41
Ohlau 237, 891
oil:
Caucasus 590-91, 641, 653, 710-11, 721, 722-3
Hungarian 889, 898, 914
mineral-oil extraction 361
plants 801, 893
Romanian 487, 565, 581, 584, 604, 641, 642, 643, 646, 774—5,
801
Soviet supplies 638, 654, 712
synthetic 361, 365, 366, 889
Okamoto, Seigo 657
OKH (Oberkommando des Heeres) see German Army High Command
OKW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht) see Wehrmacht High
Command
Olbricht, Friedrich 820, 826, 829, 833, 834, 839, 840-41, 845
Oldenburg 222, 227, 230, 707
Olympic Games:

Berlin (1936) 348, 351, 358-9, 617
Winter Olympics, Garmisch-Partenkirchen (1936) 348, 351

Omaha Beach 805, 806

opera 12, 13, 20-21, 25, 701, 709-10

Operation Alarich 768

Operation Anton 733

Operation Autumn Mist 883-4

Operation Axis 771, 772

Operation Bagration 810-11

Operation Barbarossa 587-91, 597-603, 609-10, 615-16, 618-21,
635-9, 645-8, 669, 674-5, 749

Operation Blue 711, 717, 718, 719-21

Operation Braunschweig 721-6

Operation Citadel 755-6, 762-3, 766-7, 769-70, 771-2, 774-5,
787-9

Operation Cobra 861-2

Operation Dragoon 866

Operation Felix 592

Operation Gomorrha 770

Operation Marita 604, 607-610

Operation Market Garden 866-7

Operation Mercury 608

Operation North Wind 884-5

Operation Overlord 804-6

Operation Sealion 563-4, 570

Operation Thunderclap 735

Operation Torch 732

Operation Typhoon 644, 649-50, 652

Operation Valkyrie 826-7, 829, 833-41, 846

Oppeln 891, 914

Oppenheim 893

opposition groups in Third Reich 535-7, 541-4, 548, 571, 740-41,
785, 816-20, 822-8, 833-41, 844-7

Oran 580, 730

Oranienburg 312, 921

orders:
‘Basic Order’ (January 1940) 716
‘Basic Order’ (April 1945) 919
‘Commissar Order’ (June 1941) 601-2, 819
‘Halt Order’ (December 1941) 665-7
‘scorched earth’ order (March 1945) 912-13, 931

Ordnungspolizei (regular police) 675

Orel 767, 769, 770

Organisation Todt (OT) 792, 799, 833, 836, 837, 882, 934
Orsha 810

Oscarsborg 553

Oshima, Hiroshi 619, 626, 657, 871-2, 883

Oslo 553

Ossietzky, Carl von 276

Ostara (periodical) 28-9

Oster, Hans 535-6, 541-2, 544, 820, 825, 846

Osthilfe (‘Eastern Aid’) 251

Ostjuden 92

Ostmark 413, 526

Ostministerium 690

‘Ostrogoth Gau’ 654

Ostrov 622, 846

OT (Organisation Todt) 792, 799, 833, 836, 837, 882, 934
Ott, Eugen 244, 657

Oven, Wilfred von 836
Overlord, Operation 804-6

pacifism 202, 265

‘Pact of Steel’ (1939) 487

Paderborn University 533

Palestine 453, 463, 485, 577, 580, 723
Pan-German League 153, 193

pan-Germanism:
and antisemitism 61
in Austria 22, 401
and eastern expansion 15-4
and First World War 61
and Gottfried Feder 73
H’s pan-German nationalism 36, 40, 47, 70, 151, 401
in Munich 80
and Schonerer movement 37, 39-40, 401
and working-class movement 36

Panther tanks 756, 767, 877
Panzer Corps ‘Grof§deutschland’ 894-5

Panzer divisions 554, 636, 639, 644, 652-3, 654, 655-6, 665-6,
733-4, 735, 797, 805, 811, 861, 927

Papen, Franz von:
Ambassador to Austria 317, 402, 403-5
appointed Chancellor 230
attempts to tame H 307-8, 309
big business support for 243
deposes Prussian government 231, 273, 274, 278, 283-4
and Enabling Act (1933) 263-4
Hindenburg favours 302
house-arrest (1934) 312
and H’s negotiations with Hindenburg 249-50, 251-5
imprisonment in Nuremberg 313

Marburg speech 307-8
offers H Vice-Chancellorship 233-4
opposition to 236
ousted by Schleicher 224
plans to topple Schuschnigg 386
and Potempa murder affair 238
and Reich Concordat with the Holy See 290, 295
resignation of government 242, 244-5
and sterilization law 295
Vice Chancellor in H’s cabinet 260, 302
and vote of no-confidence in government 239-40
Paris 836, 841
H’s visit (28 June 1940) 561-2
liberation 866
occupation 559-60
Paris Conference (1921) 96
Parkinson’s Syndrome 782, 871
Pas de Calais 806
Pasewalk: H hospitalized in 42, 60, 62-6
‘patriotic associations’ 114, 118, 124, 126—7, 133
Patton, George S. 864, 884, 914
Patzig, Conrad 309
Paul, Prince of Yugoslavia 603, 605
Paulus, Friedrich 723, 726, 728-9, 733-4, 735, 737, 738-40
Pavelic, Ante 758
Pearl Harbor 607, 656, 658, 660, 690, 693-4
peasants:
H’s plans for 629
and national community 272
Nazi advances among 191-2
Peenemtinde 791
Peloponnese 604

People’s Court 706, 707, 741, 844-5, 847
Persian Gulf 585, 586, 710

personality cult see Fuhrer cult

Petacci, Clara 953

Pétain, Philippe 560, 561, 581-2, 582-3, 732
Peter II, King of Yugoslavia 603

Pfeffer von Salomon, Franz 170, 186, 210, 211, 212, 213, 215, 216
Pfordten, Theodor von der 127, 136
Pfundtner, Hans 344-5

Philipp of Hesse, Prince 409, 410

Pintsch, Karl-Heinz 612

Pirow, Oswald 468

Pissia river 517

Planck, Erwin 234, 240

plebiscites:
Anschluf$ (1938) 414
Chancellor’s powers (1934) 317, 318
‘Reich peace policy’ (1933) 299-300
Saarland (1935) 332-3
Young Plan (1929) 193, 196

Ploesti oilfields 487, 565, 581, 584, 801
Plon 947, 959
Pohner, Ernst 114, 128, 129, 131, 134, 135, 161

Poland:
border question 386-7, 482, 504, 517
British Guarantee 482-3, 484, 486, 496-7, 500-502, 504-5
‘Case White’ 483-4, 502
and Czechoslovakia 423, 437, 475-6
Danzig Question 470-71, 481-2, 486, 493, 507
deportation of Jews 455, 520-21, 548-9, 573-6, 594-5, 669,
677-8

ethnic German population 154, 518, 519
extermination camps 262, 469, 678, 687-8, 697
German annexation 516-18, 585
and German annexation of Memelland 481
German invasion (September 1939) 502-3, 507-9, 516-18
‘Germanization’ of territories 515, 521, 527, 573-4
Jewish population 455, 514
Katyn case 759
massacres of Jews 520-21, 523, 573, 670, 715, 759, 764
military alliance with Britain (1939) 503
national socialist party 100
Nazi atrocities following invasion 518-27, 536, 548-9, 573-5,
601
non-aggression pact with Germany (1934) 298, 331, 483, 486
Soviet Union invades from east 517, 868, 888, 890, 892, 894
as ‘transit camp’ for Jews 669, 685
war trials 965
Polavy bridgehead 888
Polish air force 516
Polish Corridor 470-71, 475, 482, 486, 493, 504, 506, 507
Polish crisis (summer 1939) 448, 480, 489-90, 492-507
Politischer Arbeiterzirkel (Political Workers’ Circle) 82, 84
Poltava 718, 719, 821
Polzl, Johann Baptist (H’s maternal grandfather) 2
Polzl, Johanna (H’s maternal aunt) 2, 3, 10, 14, 31, 33, 34-5
Polzl, Johanna (née Huttler; H’s maternal grandmother) 2
Polzl, Klara see Hitler, Klara (H’s mother)
Polzl, Theresia (H’s maternal aunt) 2
Pomerania 188, 205, 515, 534, 891, 892, 908, 913
PomfSen 532
Ponza 768
Popitz, Johannes 541, 819, 846

Popp, Frau (Munich landlady) 49, 50
Popp, Joseph 48, 53
Posen 517, 522, 535, 678, 681-2, 776, 890, 891
Potempa murder affair (1932) 236-8
Potsch, Leopold 9
Potsdam 280, 930, 935, 939, 941, 946, 953
Prague 289, 415, 478, 479, 574, 685-6, 713, 841, 919
press:
antisemitic 37, 42-3
bourgeois 241
censorship and bans 273, 291
Hearst 207
Hugenberg 193, 196
Marxist 38
nationalist 193
Pretzsch 618
Price, Ward 412
Prien am Chiemsee 233
princes, German 169
Pring Eugen (cruiser) 704
Pripet marshes 591, 594, 610, 630, 670, 692
Probst, Christoph 741
Prohl, Ilse (later Hef$) 147
propaganda:
anti-Bolshevik 71-2, 77
H’s talent for 79-80, 96-7, 105-6, 108-9, 158, 188-9, 326, 335,
936
Nazi Party programmes 188-9, 854-5, 856-7, 858
prostitution 22, 23-4, 43
Protestant Church 295-7, 315, 381, 463, 533
Protestantism and Protestants:

in Franconia 205
optimism for H’s government 261
and support for Nazi Party 205-6, 277
in Thuringia 163
Protocols of the Elders of Zion 93, 763
Prussia:
anti-Prussian feeling in Bavaria 58, 90
bans H from public speaking 166
‘Day of Potsdam’ 280, 288
emergency decree (1933) 276
Goring appointed Minister President 283-4
Papen deposes government (1932) 231, 273, 274, 278, 283-4
pre-1918 rule in Poland 154
security police 329
state elections (1932) 227-8
terror-wave in 272-4, 276-7 see also East Prussia
Prussian Academy of Arts 292
Prussian Gestapo 306
psychiatry 529-30
Puccini, Giacomo 20
putsch attempt (Munich, 1923) 42, 64, 79, 98, 118-19, 127-32,
133, 138, 189, 455

Puttkamer, Karl-Jesko Otto von 375, 515, 556, 880, 925, 942
Quisling, Vidkun 553, 758

‘racial hygiene’ 530

‘racial purity’ 22, 28, 56, 182, 342-3, 371, 452, 572
racist theory 28-9, 148, 180-81, 323, 526, 632
radar 761, 770

Rademacher, Franz 576—7

radio broadcasts 264-5, 279, 353, 406, 507, 731, 748, 773, 784,
789-90, 885, 898-9
Raeder, Erich:
and annexation of Memelland (1939) 481
and bombing of the Deutschland (1937) 384
and Fritsch scandal (1938) 398
and German expansionism 390
and German occupation of France 561
imprisonment 964-5
and opening of Western Front 540
preparation for war with Britain 422
and proposed invasion of Britain 563, 565, 567, 568
and rearmament 265, 353, 387
replaced by Donitz 761
and Scandinavian campaign 551, 552, 554
and war in Mediterranean 580

rallies:
Deutscher Tag (‘German Day’): (1922) 109;
(1923) 123-4
National Opposition 223
Nazi Party:
Munich 119-20, 122, 357
Nuremberg 110;
(1927) 174, 184-5;
(1929) 174, 194, 530;
(1933) 304;
(1934) 319;
(1935) 339, 344-5;
(1936) 361, 363, 364, 365, 368;
(1937) 378, 381, 383, 386
(1938) 432, 434;
(1939; cancelled) 502
Thuringian Gau 307
Weimar 172-3, 174, 180
Reich Party Rally of Freedom (1935) 344

Reich Party Rally of Victory (1933) 304

‘Rally of German Art’ (Munich, 1939) 490

Ranke, Leopold von 145

Rapallo Treaty (1922) 182, 331

Rastenburg 586, 624, 702, 814, 829

Raterepublik 67-8, 70-71, 72, 90, 106, 107, 135

Rath, Ernst vom 455, 456-7, 462

rationing 502, 705

Rattenhuber, Johann 792

Ratzel, Friedrich 154

Raubal, Angela (‘Geli’; H’s niece) 177, 218-22, 380, 490

Raubal, Angela (née Hitler; H’s half-sister) see Hammitzsch, Angela

Raubal, Leo 16

Ravensbrtick concentration camp 714

rearmament 265-7, 270, 297-9, 331, 333-7, 350, 359-60, 362, 364,
472 see also Four-Year Plan

Rechlin 490, 931, 947

Red Army:

advance on Berlin 892, 904, 920-21, 923-4, 926-7, 928, 931,
934-42, 946, 952, 953-4

atrocities 879, 919-20

counter-offensives: (December 1941) 656, 661-2: 664, 690;

(December 1943) 786, 787;

(spring 1944) 797-8;

(summer 1944) 810-11, 813-14, 851, 867-8, 879;

(winter 1945) 886, 888-92, 894-6, 905, 908, 914, 918

in Finland 56, 718

and German army spring/summer offensive (1942) 711-12, 720

German surrender to 959

invasion of Germany 890, 893, 919-21

losses 623, 626, 627, 644, 652, 712, 754-5, 920

Operation Bagration 810-11

and Operation Citadel 766-7, 772, 774-5
size 639, 888, 934

‘Stalingrad Front’ 733

in Ukraine 644

‘Red Roses Bring You Happiness’ (song) 926

Reggio di Calabria 771, 772

Reich, Das (newspaper) 686, 706

Reich Agrarian League (Reichslandbund) 243, 251, 267
Reich Association of Asylums 533

Reich Association of German Industry 268, 269

Reich Chancellery:
bomb damage 901, 922
‘Fuhrer Apartment’ 376, 378, 926
H returns to (January 1945) 895
H’s entourage in 293-4, 324-6, 373-7
New Reich Chancellery 901, 902, 903, 954, 958
‘Wintergarten’ 376, 923, 956-8 see also Fuhrer Bunker

Reich Citizenship Law 345-9, 451
Reich Commissars 278
‘Reich Committee for the German People’s Petition’ 193

‘Reich Committee for the Scientific Registration of Serious
Hereditary and Congenital Suffering’ 532

Reich Defence Commissars 854, 857, 912

Reich Estate of German Industry (Reichsstand der Deutschen
Industrie) 269

Reich Governors (Reichsstatthalter) 283-4

Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories 634, 689-90
Reich Party Rally of Freedom (1935) 344

Reich Party Rally of Victory (1933) 304

Reich Security Main Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt; RSHA) 679,
690, 825

Reichenau, Walter von:
ambitions to run War Ministry 397, 398
and the Anschlufg 404, 408
and Czechoslovakia 428-9
death 666
and genocidal programme 672
and oath of unconditional loyalty to H 318
and rearmament 266
and the SA 309
takes over from Rundstedt 655
Reich Presidency elections: (1925) 165;
(1932) 224, 226-7
Reichsbank 223, 267, 347, 472
Reichsbanner 237, 275, 289
Reichsflagge 120, 123, 124

Reichskristallnacht (Crystal Night; 9-10 November 1938) 449-50,
454, 457-60, 462-7, 679
Reichslandbund (Reich Agrarian League) 243, 251, 267

Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA; Reich Security Main Office) 679,
690, 825

Reichsstand der Deutschen Industrie (Reich Estate of German
Industry) 269

Reichsstatthalter (Reich Governors) 283-4

Reichstag elections: (1924) 132-3, 141-2, 144, 165, 178;
(1928) 187, 190, 204;
(1930) 198, 199, 201-2, 204-6, 209, 223;
(1932) 224, 230, 231-2, 235, 240-42;
(1933) 264-5, 272, 277-8, 299-300;
(1936) 353, 356;
(1938) 414

Reichstag fire (27 February 1933) 274-6, 277

Reichswehr:
Bayerische Reichswehr Gruppenkommando Nr.4 71-2
Briining and 229
emergency powers (1923) 125
and Freikorps 107
H’s need for its support 122-3, 137
and H’s talent for nationalist agitation 77-8
influences H’s ideology 64, 70, 71
introduction of Nazi emblem 304
Leipzig Reichswehr trial (1930) 206-8, 217
oath of unconditional loyalty to H 317-18
and putsch attempt (1923) 126, 130, 133
rearmament 266-7
and the SA 302, 304-5, 306, 308-9, 310
support for NSDAP 95
training of soldiers 73, 93, 120
‘war games’ exercise (December 1932) 244 see also German army;

Wehrmacht

Reichwein, Adolf 824

Reinhardt, Fritz 270, 656

Reinhardt, Hans 890

Reisser, Hans 957

Reiter, Maria (‘Mizzi’/‘Mimi’) 218

Reitsch, Hanna 938, 947

Remagen 892-3, 908

Remer, Otto Ernst 837-8, 839, 845

Rendulic, Lothar 890

reparations 96, 132, 191, 198, 208, 222

Reserve Army 662, 835, 845, 860

Reusch, Paul 243

Reuters 943

Reval 687

Rheims 962, 963

Rheyd 168

Rhine river 892-3, 905, 908

Rhineland: remilitarization of 350-58, 363, 368-9, 402
Ribbentrop Bureau (Dienstelle Ribbentrop) 370

Ribbentrop, Joachim von:
Ambassador in London 338, 369, 408
and Anglo-German Naval Agreement (1935) 338, 369
and annexation of Memelland (1939) 481
and the Anschluf$ 404—5, 408
anti-British 471, 472, 579
and Anti-Comintern Pact (1936) 370
and Balkan campaign 605
and Czechoslovakia 418, 419, 426, 430, 444, 448, 476, 477
and D-Day 805
and declaration of war on United States 659
dismissal 950
dissuades H from scrapping Geneva convention 905
fanatical devotion to H 338, 352
in Fiihrer Bunker 902, 923, 929, 933
and Goring 471, 472
held in contempt 900
and Hefs affair (May 1941) 612, 614
and H’s negotiations with Hindenburg 252, 253, 255
ideas of a future European federation 760
intended ‘European-Asiatic Bloc’ 583, 584
and invasion of Hungary (March 1944) 795
and Italian crisis (July 1943) 768-9
and Japan 606, 657-8
‘Jewish Question’ 577, 684, 758, 775
joins NSDAP 236, 338
leaves Fithrer Bunker 925
marriage 236

meeting with Ciano (May 1942) 710
and Molotov 584-5
and Munich Agreement negotiations (1938) 434, 435, 438, 442,
444
and Mussolini 580-81, 710
and occupation of France 561
‘Pact of Steel’ (1939) 487
personality 236, 338, 492, 585
and Polish crisis (1939) 470-71, 475, 501, 505, 507, 509-10, 511
proposals for ending war 896-7, 899
rejected by Donitz 962
and remilitarization of Rhineland 352, 353
replaces Neurath at Foreign Office 398, 400
and Russian campaign 710
and Soviet-German non-aggression pact (1939) 496, 498-9
and Soviet-German trade treaty (1939) 488-9, 495-6
and Spanish Civil War 363
talks with Guderian (January 1945) 896
trial and execution 964
urges peace offers with Stalin 730, 773
and Vichy France 581-2, 583
Richthofen, Wolfram Freiherr von 734, 735
Riefenstahl, Leni 319
Riga 687, 689
Right:
animosity towards Berlin 123
bourgeois 200-201, 204, 226
counter-revolutionary 105-6, 121
determination to eliminate democracy and socialism 256
first attempt to take over state 93
and German defeat in First World War 60, 67
and H’s cabinet 260
nationalist 105-7, 111, 156, 193
political murders 106, 231, 308
volkisch 86, 94, 132-3, 139-40, 144, 149, 151-3, 164-5

road-building 271-2, 425, 431, 632, 650, 702
Robinson, Simon 40

Rock Eyrie (Felsennest; Fiihrer Headquarters) 556, 748
Rohland, Walter 655

Rohm, Ernst:

attempts to revitalize Kampfbund 137

Chief of Staff of SA 216-17, 301, 302-12

and Frontbann 143

and the ‘German Revolution’ 303-4

H introduced to 94

homosexuality 216, 315

and H’s meetings with Papen 251

murdered 137, 189, 311, 312-13

and paramilitary organization of NSDAP 106-8, 118, 120-21,

122, 124

and putsch attempt (1923) 129, 131, 134, 143

and Schleicher 233

State Commissar (Bavaria) 278

and Strasser’s resignation of party offices 248

withdraws from politics and moves to Bolivia 162, 163, 216
Romania:

declares war on Germany 867

economic satellite 487

German need to secure 862

oil-fields 487, 565, 581, 584, 604, 641, 642, 643, 646, 774-5, 801

rumours of German threats to 480

Soviet designs on 584, 585

treatment of Jews 758

Tripartite Pact (1940) 584, 604
Romanian army 591, 619, 729, 733, 738, 739, 742, 798, 867
Rome 425, 768, 769, 770, 775-6, 803

Rommel, Erwin:
and Allied invasion 803-4, 807-8, 813, 861

death 875-6

El Alamein 727, 730

and Italian crisis (July 1943) 768, 769
and July plotters 875

replaced by Arnim 757

retreat 730, 736

seriously injured 861, 875

tactics 591

taking of Tobruk 717-18

urges H to end war 851, 861

Roosevelt, Franklin D.:
armaments programme 712
at Casablanca Conference (1943) 754
death 918-19
declares war on Japan 656
at Evian Conference (1938) 462
grant of destroyers to Britain 571, 580
H’s attacks on 728
and public opinion 908-9
sends telegram after German invasion of Czechoslovakia 485
at Yalta Conference (1945) 893, 904

Roques, Karl von 673-4

Rosenberg, Alfred:
anti-Bolshevism 152
and conflict with Churches 381
contributes to Auf gut Deutsch 95, 97
and Crystal Night 465
and deportation of Volga Germans 683-4
and development of genocidal programme 676, 694
and ‘Final Solution’ 716
heads Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories 634,
650, 925
and H’s refounding of NSDAP 163
and Nazi atrocities in Poland 521, 525
and the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ 311

and opening of Western Front 538
ousted 140
party chairman in H’s absence 132, 140, 141
and plans for ‘New Order’ 633, 634
and Thule Society 82
trial and execution 964

Rosenheim 89, 91, 92, 99

Roslavl 662

Rossini, Gioachino 20

Rostock 707-8

Rostov 590, 641, 654, 655-6, 657, 722

Rotterdam 557

Rover, Carl 712

Royal Air Force:
Battle of Britain 569-70
Bomber Command 893
bombing of Berghof 907, 935
bombing raids 718, 727-8, 753, 762, 770, 861, 893-4, 921
‘dam-buster’ raids 762
Dunkirk 559
Royal Navy:
Anglo-German Naval Agreement (1935) 337-8, 368-9, 486
destruction of French ships at Mers-el-Kébir 562
grant of US destroyers 570-71, 580
Mediterranean fleet 571, 580
sinking of Bismarck 617-18
strength of 471, 564
success against U-boat menace 761
RSHA (Reichssicherheitshauptamt; Reich Security Main Office) 679,
690, 825

rubber 361, 366, 556, 590, 630, 713
Ruhr:

bombing raids 762-3

French occupation (1923) 118, 119, 121, 151, 170
iron dispute (1928) 191

taken by western Allies 911, 918, 919

Runciman, Walter, 1st Viscount 432, 433

Rundstedt, Gerd von:
and Allied invasion 804-5, 807-8, 813, 893
in ‘Court of Honour’ 844
declaration of loyalty 796
and invasion of Czechoslovakia 429
and invasion of Soviet Union 636, 662-3
and opening of Eastern Front 590
and opening of Western Front 542, 544, 554, 558, 787
and opposition to H 542, 544, 819
and proposed invasion of Britain 563-4
at Rommel’s funeral 876
sacked 655-6, 813, 861, 892

Rupprecht, Crown Prince of Bavaria 161

Russia:
drive for world revolution 384
and H’s quest for ‘living space’ 146, 152-5, 158, 180, 182, 362
and Japan 361, 580 see also Bolshevism; Soviet Union

‘Russian Fanfare’ 626

Russian Revolution 61, 93, 178

Rust, Bernhard 247, 925

Rzhev 723, 724

SA (Sturmabteilung):
absorbs Stahlhelm 289
antisemitic violence 340, 343
banned 228-30
and boycott of Jewish businesses 287
Brownshirts 202, 303
continuing the ‘German Revolution’ 303

and destruction of trade union movement 289

development of 88, 97, 108, 123

and emergency decree (1933) 276, 281

equipping of 118, 306

‘German Day’ demonstration (Coburg; 1922) 109

H takes over as supreme leader 216

homosexuality in 315

and H’s appointment as Chancellor H’s crushing of SA leadership
285, 301-16

mob violence 279, 301, 302-3, 315

and Nazi seizure of power in the Lander 278

and November pogrom (1938) 457-8

party rallies 194, 223

and personal loyalty to H 185-6, 216, 217, 304, 308

Pfeffer von Salomon as leader 170, 186, 216

Potempa murder affair (1932) 236-8

Prussian terror-wave (1933) 273

Rohm and 107-8, 118, 120, 162, 216-17, 302-12

role of party support troop 162

Stennes’s revolt (1931) 217

streetfights with Communists 230-31

tensions with NSDAP 216-17

torchlight procession (30 January 1933) 261

and Total War Effort 858 Wohrden incident (1929) 191-2

working class support of 205

SA-Mann (newspaper) 304

Saar 332-3, 578, 911

Saarbrticken 559

Sachsenhausen concentration camp 459, 547
St Germain Treaty (1919) 401

St Nazaire 863

Sakhalin 586

Salmuth, Hans von 601

Salo, Repubblica di 774
Salonika 605, 768

Salzburg 51, 100, 404, 494, 500
Salzkammergut 768

San river 499, 517

Sander, Gerhard 831

Sanssouci 379

Sa6ne river 866

Sardinia 763, 767, 772

Sauckel, Fritz 749, 854, 964
Saur, Karl Otto 799, 800, 801, 950

Saxony:
lifts ban on H’s public speaking 184
Nazi seizure of power 278
Soviet invasion 919
state elections: (1929) 192-3, 200;
(1930) 204
striking metal-workers 200

Scandinavian campaign (1940) 552-4

Schacht, Hjalmar:
and anti-Jewish legislation 342, 343-4, 347, 463
at Bad Harzburg rally 223
and boycott of Jewish businesses 286, 287
and economic crisis of 1936 359, 360
and Four-Year Plan 364—5, 367
and funding of Nazi regime 269
and H’s Reich Chancellery entourage 293
and July plotters 846
and ‘Keppler Circle’ 243
leaves Economic Ministry 383, 398
and Nazi economic policy 270, 418
President of Reichsbank 232, 267

sacked 472
Schadle, Franz 960
Scharnhorst (battleship) 704
Scharnhorst, Gerhard von 809
Scharrer, Eduard 153
Schaub, Julius:
and crushing of SA leadership 310
in Fiihrer Bunker 922, 925, 931
and H’s leadership style 212
and November pogrom (1938) 458-9, 466
and putsch attempt (1923) 173, 375
in Reich Chancellery entourage 293, 375
in wartime Fuhrer Headquarters 515, 556, 879
Schaumberg-Lippe 278
Scheldt estuary 866
Schellenberg, Walter 943-4, 945
Schemm, Hans 278
Schenk, Ernst Giinther 953
Scheringer, Richard 207, 208
Scheubner-Richter, Max Erwin von 97, 117, 124, 126, 131, 152
Schichtl, Rosalia 3
Schicklgruber family 1
Schicklgruber, Johann (H’s paternal great-grandfather) 1
Schicklgruber, Maria Anna see Hiedler, Maria Anna
Schirach, Baldur von:
‘evacuation’ of Jews from Vienna 594—5, 687
imprisonment 964-5
leads Hitler Youth and Nazi Students’ Federation 191
marriage 218, 765
offers resignation 765-6
Reich Youth Leader of NSDAP 218

Schirach, Henriette von 765
Schlabrendorff, Fabian von 819, 821-2
Schlegelberger, Franz 705, 707

Schleicher, Kurt von:
appointed Reich Chancellor 245, 249
and banning of SA 229, 230
deal with H 229-30, 232-3, 236, 238
isolation 251
murdered 312, 314, 316, 940
ousts Papen 224
overtures to Gregor Strasser 244, 245, 246
and Papen’s appointment as Chancellor 230
resignation as Chancellor 252, 253
and Rohm 306
target of Nazi aggression 236
and vote of no-confidence in government 239, 252

Schleswig-Holstein 188, 191, 205, 961
Schleswig-Holstein (battleship) 508
Schlitt, Ewald 707, 708

Schlof§ Hirschberg 877

Schmid, Wilhelm 310

Schmidt, Ernst 68-9, 70, 561

Schmidt, Guido 403-4, 405

Schmidt, Otto 394, 395-6

Schmidt, Paul:
at H’s meeting with Hacha 477
at Munich Agreement negotiations (1938) 434, 435, 438, 440,
441, 443, 445
and H’s negotiations with Eden 336
and H’s talks with Mussolini 757, 842
and negotiations with Molotov (November 1940) 585
and Polish crisis talks (1939) 501, 503, 505, 507, 510

on Ribbentrop 338
Schmidt-Falk, Elsa 29
Schmitt Carl 239 316
Schmorell, Alexander 741

Schmundt, Rudolf:
death 875
declaration of loyalty 796
and deportation of Jews 684
and dismissal of Manstein and Kleist 797
and drive for Moscow 643
and Halder 726
and Heim 733
and H’s security 821
in wartime Fithrer Headquarters 515, 556, 725
and winter crisis on Eastern Front (1941-2) 662, 665

Schneidhuber, August 310

Schnitzler, Arthur 23

Schnurre, Karl 489

Schoengarth, Karl 696

Scholl, Hans 741

Scholl, Sophie 741

Schonerer, Georg Ritter von 22, 23, 29, 32, 36, 401
Schonerer movement 22, 36, 37, 39-40, 401
Schopenhauer, Arthur 54

Schorfheide 924

Schorner, Ferdinand 797, 891, 927, 941, 950, 952
Schreck, Julius 70, 293, 310

Schroder, Kurt von 243, 249-50

Schroeder, Christa 374, 478, 515, 625, 626, 701, 923, 925
Schulenburg, Friedrich Werner Graf von der 488, 489, 498, 586
Schulenburg, Fritz-Dietlof Graf von der 825, 846

Schulte, Karl Joseph 355

Schultze, Walter 131

Schuschnigg, Kurt 317, 386, 403-8, 409-10
Schutzstaffel see SS

Schwagermann, Gunther 960

Schwarz, Franz Xaver 187, 219, 225

Schwarze Korps, Das (SS newspaper) 467, 468-9
Schwede-Coburg, Franz 534

Schwerin von Krosigk, Lutz Graf 232, 254, 263, 916, 925, 950, 962
Schwerin von Schwanenfeld, Ulrich Wilhelm Graf 846
Schwielow Lake 953

‘scorched earth’ order (March 1945) 912-13, 931
Scotland 611-12, 616

SD (Sicherheitsdienst; Security Service):
and anti-Jewish policy 383, 452-3, 577, 678-9, 681
crackdown on black-marketeers 706
and development of genocidal programme 675, 678, 698
Eichmann and 330, 415
‘Jewish Department’ 330, 415
origins of 452
reports on popular opinion 432, 731, 740, 762, 907, 915
and the SA 308
and the SS 452
and the Wehrmacht 672
Sea of Azov 651, 719, 724, 772
Sealion, Operation 563-4, 570
Sebottendorff, Rudolf Freiherr von 82

‘Second Law for the Coordination of the Lander with the Reich’
(1933) 283, 284

Second World War:
Allied advances in the west 806-10, 813, 851, 861-7

Allied assault on Germany 892-3, 908, 914, 918, 935, 961

Ardennes offensive 873, 875, 879, 880-87, 892

Balkan campaign 603-5, 607-10, 648

Battle of Britain 569-70

battle for Stalingrad 648, 727, 728-9, 731, 733-6, 737-44

Britain declares war on Germany 510

D-Day (6 June 1944) 804-6

Dunkirk evacuation 557-9

German army spring/summer offensive (1942) 700, 710-13, 717,
718, 719-26

German army’s winter crisis on Eastern Front (1941-2) 645-6,
647, 651-6, 661-7, 693, 700, 704, 710

German capitulation xxix, 895, 904, 958-9, 961-3

German invasion of France 557, 559-62

German invasion of Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa) 622-4,
626-51

last German counter-offensive (March 1945) 908, 914

last German offensive in the east (Operation Citadel) 755-6, 762-
3, 766-7, 771-2, 774-5, 787-9, 797-8

North African campaign 591, 717-18, 727, 729-30, 731, 732-3,
736, 756-7, 760-61

opening of Eastern Front 565-6, 567-9, 578-9, 586-91, 597-603,
609-10, 618-21

opening of Western Front 537-41, 547-8, 550-51, 554-6

Red Army advance on Berlin 892, 904, 920-21, 923-4, 926-7,
928, 931, 934-42, 946, 952, 953-4

Scandinavian campaign 552-4

Soviet counter-offensives: (December 1941) 656, 661-2, 664, 690;

(December 1943) 786, 787;

(spring 1944) 797-8;

(summer 1944) 810-11, 813-14, 851, 867-8, 879;

(winter 1945) 886, 888-92, 894-6, 905, 908, 914, 918

United States enters 656

‘world war’ term 693

Sedan, battle of (1870) 123

Seeckt, Hans von 120, 127, 384-5

Seidlitz, Gertrud von 117

SeifgSer, Hans Ritter von 126-7, 128-9, 130, 133, 134, 135
Seldte, Franz 193, 222, 254-5, 260, 270, 925
Semper, Gottfried 33

Sevastopol 663, 710, 717, 719, 798

Seven Years War 781, 882, 909, 918

Severing, Carl 231

Seydlitz-Kurzbach, Walter von 796, 897
Sey8-Inquart, Arthur 404, 405-6, 409-12, 950, 964
Shanghai 463

Shirer, William:
on the Anschlufs 410-11
on H’s public speaking 354, 440-41, 486
and Munich Agreement negotiations (1938) 441, 442
on outbreak of war 508, 509

Siberia 669, 677, 683, 714

Sicherheitsdienst see SD

Sicily 757, 763, 768, 772

Silesia 266, 518, 697, 709, 823, 888, 890, 891, 899, 911, 914

Simon, Sir John 333, 334, 336-7, 338

Simpson, Wallis 369

Singapore 580, 606, 704

Skoda works, Czechoslovakia 474

Skorzeny, Otto 774, 845, 877-8

Slavs 47, 417, 569, 591, 597, 603, 628-9, 651, 669

Slovak army 591

Slovakia 474, 475-6, 481, 594, 604, 867

Smolensk 623, 627, 637, 759, 821

Sobibor extermination camp 262, 688, 697, 715, 775

Social Democrats see SPD

‘social question’ 37, 181-2, 183

social-Darwinism 180-81, 182, 186, 213, 215, 269, 321, 323, 365,
530, 572, 633, 785, 906

socialism:

and antisemitism 91

and ‘national community’ 182

of Otto Strasser 201 see also anti-socialism
SOE (Special Operations Executive) 713-14
Soissons 807
Soldau 688

Solmitz, Louise 260, 277

Somme, Battle of the 51, 57

‘Sonderkommando Lange’ 535

Sonderkommandos (‘special forces’) 618

Sonnenstein 534

Sopade 493

South America 370, 463

South Tyrol 151, 183-4, 426, 540, 799

‘Soviet Paradise, The’ (anti-Bolshevik exhibition) 714

Soviet Union:

advance on Berlin 892, 904, 920-21, 923-4, 926-7, 928, 931,
934-42, 946, 952, 953-4

battle for Stalingrad 648, 727, 728-9, 731, 733-6, 737-44

Communism 67, 150, 178, 599, 670

as continental ally of Britain 642, 645

counter-offensives: (December 1941) 656, 661-2, 664, 690;

(December 1943) 786, 787;

(spring 1944) 797-8;

(summer 1944) 810-11, 813-14, 851, 867-8, 879;

(winter 1945) 886, 888-92, 894-6, 905, 908, 914, 918

and Czechoslovakia 423

deportation of Volga Germans 683-4

diplomatic relations with western powers (1920s) 182

expansionist policy 565-6

German army spring/summer offensive (1942) 700, 710-13, 717,
718, 719-26

German army’s winter crisis on Eastern Front (1941-2) 645-6,
647, 651-6, 661-7, 693, 704

and German capitulation 959, 963

German diplomatic relations with 331-2, 488-9, 583-6

German invasion (Operation Barbarossa; June 1941) 622-4, 626-
51

German plans for attack on 158, 567-9, 578-9, 586-91, 597-603,
609-10, 615-16, 618-21

inevitability of war with 362-3

invasion of Germany 890, 893, 919-21

and Japan 580, 871

Jewish population 669, 693

last German offensive (Operation Citadel; July 1943) 755-6, 762-
3, 766-7, 769-70, 771-2, 774-5, 787-9

mass graves of Polish officers 759

massacres of Jews 670-71, 674-6, 715

Nazi atrocities in 623, 668-71, 674-6

non-aggression pact with Germany (1939) 496, 498-9, 500, 501,
502, 551, 580, 585, 621

oil-fields 590-91, 641, 710-11, 712

Operation Blue 711, 717, 718, 719-26

pact with France 332, 337, 351, 352, 354, 364

and Poland 487-9

resettlement of Jews 669, 682-3, 686, 690

Stalinist purges 385

trade treaty with Germany (1939) 488-9, 495-6

Treaty of Friendship with Germany (1939) 517

war with Finland 551, 552, 569, 584, 868 see also Bolshevism;
Red Army; Russia; Russian Revolution

Spaatz, Carl 963

Spain:

and the Axis 579, 580-83, 592
reprisals for bombing of the Deutschland (1937) 384-5

Spandau prison 616
Spanish Civil War 361-4, 368-9, 385, 389, 404
Spartacism 73

SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands):

bans 273, 289
and Bavarian revolutionary period 69-70
and emergency decree 276

and Enabling Act (1933) 281-2

end of 289

fall of Mtiller administration (1930) 199
‘grand coalition’ 191

H links with Jews 38, 64

H’s hatred for 32, 36-7, 38, 57, 208
and liberal democracy 178

Prussian government deposed (1932) 231
Reichstag elections: (1930) 204-5;
(1932) 241-2;

(1933) 277

and Reichstag fire (1933) 275

in Saar 333

Sopade 493

state elections (1932) 228

support of democracy 258

‘toleration’ policy 206

and trade unionism 178, 288

‘Special Commission, 20 July’ 846
Special Operations Executive (SOE) 713-14

Speer, Albert:
and Ardennes offensive 873
Armaments Minister 703-4, 714, 743, 791-2, 801, 854, 950
and ‘Committee of Three’ 750-51, 752, 753
conflict with Sauckel 854
as ‘court favourite’ 324-5, 376, 378-9, 430, 492, 511
and D-Day 804
driving ambition 703, 910
in Fiihrer Bunker 923, 924, 928, 931-2, 935
and Hefs affair 612
and H’s antisemitism 40, 465
on H’s ‘genius’ 781, 783-4
and H’s intimation of weakness of German people 851
and H’s refusal to end war 899-900
imprisonment 964-5

and ‘Jewish Question’ 593, 714
and July 1944 assassination attempt 836, 837, 838, 848
knee operation 799
leaves Fithrer Bunker 925, 931, 934
loyalty to H 900
memoranda on end of arms production and collapse of economy
899, 911-12

New Reich Chancellery 901
prepares for post-Hitler Germany 910-11
and radicalization of home front 854
rebuilding of Berlin 378, 379
relationship with H 379, 703, 932
replaced as Armaments Minister 950
retained in cabinet by Donitz 962
return to ‘Berghof family’ 799-800
and Ribbentrop’s talks with Guderian 896
supports atomic bomb research 874
tours occupied Paris with H 561-2
views H as demonic figure xxxiii

Speidel, Hans 821

Sperrle, Hugo 404, 813

Spital, Waldviertel, Austria 2

Sponeck, Hans Graf von 666

Springorum, Fritz 243

SS (Schutzstaffel; Protection Squad):
antisemitic violence 279, 340, 416
atrocities in Poland 518-20, 522-5, 527, 573-4, 574, 601, 764
atrocities in Ukraine 826
Austrian putsch attempt (1934) 316-17
banned 228
and Blomberg-Fritsch scandals 422
breaks with SA 306, 308-9, 316, 329
‘clearing’ of asylums 534-5
and deportation of Jews 690, 759

‘disloyalty’ 928, 943, 945

and emergency decree (1933) 276, 281

expansionist ambitions 448-9

and ‘Final Solution’ 527, 697, 699, 716, 775-7

foundation 172-3

and ‘Fuhrer will’ 321

H takes over as supreme leader 216

Himmler appointed leader xxxviii, 189

and Himmler’s overtures to Britain and America 860

house-arrest of Goring 933

H’s bodyguards 821, 895, 937, 956, 957

and invasion of Poland 508

and ‘Jewish Question’ 416, 452, 458, 464, 467-9, 573, 577, 578—
9, 759

and July 1944 assassination attempt 845, 848

last days in Berlin 923

merges into police 327, 329-30, 848

and Nazi seizure of power in the Lander 278

and the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ 312, 314, 316

and November pogrom (1938) 457-8

and occupation of Italy 772

party rallies 194, 223

power ambitions 515, 518

Prussian terror-wave (1933) 273

racial selection programme 28

removal of Jews from Hungary 878

removed from military jurisdiction 524

reprisals after assassination of Heydrich 714

and Russian campaign 634, 635, 914

‘special tasks’ for removal of Jews 597-9

torchlight procession (30 January 1933) 261

and Wehrmacht 519, 523-4, 671-2, 673-4 see also Einsatzgruppen

SS-Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler (H’s houseguards) 309, 310, 375, 377
Staaken 926
Staatspartei 289

Stahlhelm (veterans’ organization) 193, 194, 222-3, 226, 254, 260,
273, 281, 289

Stalin, Joseph:
attacks Western appeasement policies 488
compared with H xxxiv—xxxv
contemplates peace terms (July 1941) 640
deportation of Volga Germans 683
expansionist policies 565-6
and German army spring offensive (1942) 713
and German invasion 623, 646
and German surrender 963
H sees as ‘instrument of Jewry’ 693
H’s admiration for 629, 844, 898
H’s ‘special peace’ proposals 908-9
and Japanese attempts to broker peace settlement 871, 872
partisan war 676
and Poland 517, 868
purges 385, 551, 844
and Red Army invasion of Germany 919
show-trials 845
and Soviet-German non-aggression pact (1939) 489, 496, 498-9,
580
at Yalta Conference (1945) 893, 904
Stalingrad:
battle for 648, 727, 728-9, 731, 733-6, 737-44
plans to take 644, 651, 720, 721-2, 723
Stalino 724
Starnberg, Lake 171
Stauffenberg, Berthold 846
Stauffenberg, Claus Schenk Graf von:
background 825-6
execution 839, 841, 844, 845
leader of July assassination plotters 817, 818, 827-32
Operation Valkyrie 826-7, 833-5

sees Tresckow as his ‘guiding master’ 820
steel 387, 775, 863
Stefanie (early infatuation) 13, 22, 219
Stein, Franz 36
Steinau 891
Steiner, Felix 920, 927, 928, 940, 943, 945
Stennes, Walter 217, 248
sterilization:
of incurably ill 530
of inferior races 28
sterilization law 294-5
Stettin 555, 575
Stevens, Richard H. 545
Stieff, Hellmuth 821, 846, 847
Stockholm 792, 943
Stolzing-Cerny, Josef 147
Stoftrupp Adolf Hitler (Adolf Hitler Assault Squad) 172-3, 457,
458, 466
Strasbourg 884
Strasser, Gregor:
awarded NSDAP badge of honour 249
background and views 166-7, 245-6
and DVFP 141
and Goebbels 245
H proposes for Labour Ministry 232
on H’s leadership style 210, 211-12
and H’s refounding of NSDAP 163, 170
murdered 249, 312, 314
and NSDAP in north Germany 166-7, 170
and NSDAP programme 169, 171
organizational leadership of NSDAP 188, 190
and party funding 225

Propaganda Leader of NSDAP 170, 187-8
Reichstag deputy 190, 208
resignation of all his party offices 245-9
Schleicher’s overtures to 244, 245, 246, 251
Strasser, Otto 193, 200-201, 207, 216, 219, 545
Straulg, Adolf 666
Straus, Johann 20, 800
Strauls, Richard 490
Streicher, Julius:
and Albert Forster 492
antisemitism 109, 340
and ban on intermarriage 342-3
boycott of Jewish businesses 285, 287, 339-40
and Goebbels 170-71
and GVG 141, 144
H’s gratitude to 110
and H’s refounding of NSDAP 164
and north German NSDAP 167
and NSDAP during H’s imprisonment 140
and putsch attempt (1923) 131
transfers to NSDAP 109
trial and execution 109, 964
‘Strength through Joy’ 594
Stresa Front 337, 338, 339, 349, 350
Stresemann, Gustav 194-5, 297, 300
Strones, Waldviertel 1
Stroop, Jurgen 764, 965
Stuckart, Wilhelm 345, 412, 522
Student, Kurt 608
Stulpnagel, Karl Heinrich von 836, 863, 875
Stulpnagel, Otto von 542
Stumpfegger, Ludwig 870, 951-2, 960, 961

Stumpff, Hans-Jiirgen 963

Sturmabteilung see SA

Sturmer, Der (newspaper) 109, 340, 343, 344
Stuttgart 171, 885

Styria 406

Sudetenland:
crisis (1938) 385, 386-7, 419, 424-47, 474, 493, 816
Sudeten Germans 154, 417, 419, 420, 424, 426, 431, 432-3, 436,
437, 446

Suez Canal 567, 580, 727
Sukhinichi 723

Suner, Ramon Serrano 580-81
Swabia 132

swastika:
adopted by army 304
armband 174
at Nuremberg rallies 345
flown on Viennese churches 413
Jews banned from raising flag 341
and NSDAP banner 88, 109, 278, 281
used by New Templar Order 28

Sweden 487, 551, 586, 630, 775, 896-7, 943-4
Swinemtinde 481

Switzerland 118, 944

Sword Beach 805

Syria 485, 580

Szalasi, Ferencz 876, 877, 878

Sztojay, Dome 795

‘T4’ (‘euthanasia action’ code-name) 534—5
‘table talk’ monologues xxx

Taganrog 719

Tannenberg Memorial, East Prussia 318, 502
Tarnopol 796

tea 650

Tedder, Arthur W. 963

Tegernsee 221, 309, 311

Tempelhof aerodrome 834, 935

Terboven, Josef 309

Thalmann, Ernst 226—7

Theresienstadt 775

Thierack, Otto Georg 705-6, 707, 848, 925, 950

Third Reich:

administrative anarchy 571-2, 746-7, 750

Anschlufg a defining moment 414-15

‘breach of civilization’ 274

characteristics of H’s regime 421-2, 571-3, 738, 746-7, 750, 753,
900, 966-9

constitution 207, 276

corruption 326—7

‘cumulative radicalization’ 285, 320-22, 572-9, 705-9, 744, 749-
50, 854-7

development of foreign policy 297, 321, 330-39, 361-4, 368-71,
384-91, 416-23, 471-3

distortions of truth 738

dominant role of party in last months of regime 853-4

eastern expansion 712-13

end of 916-18, 924-5, 935, 949-50, 961-3, 969

Four-Year Plan 364-8, 397, 402, 403, 460, 461, 474, 634

‘New Order’ 632-5, 650-51, 654, 712-13, 775

rearmament 265-7, 270, 297-9, 331, 333-7, 350, 359-60, 362,
364, 472

shortages 502, 573, 680, 705, 854, 886

Total War Effort 746-7, 854-60

Thomas, Georg 589, 590, 597
Thule Society 81-2
Thunderclap, Operation 735
Thuringia 163, 188, 197, 226, 307, 630, 730
Thyssen (corporation) 451
Thyssen, Fritz 117, 193, 223-4, 224-5, 243
Tiger tanks 743, 756, 767
Times, The 968
Timoshenko, Semyon 649, 721
Tiso, Jozef 476, 758
Tito, Josip Broz 867
Tobruk 717
Todt, Fritz 272, 425, 586, 650, 655, 702-3, 719
Topf, J. A. and Sons 687
Torch, Operation 732
Torgau 935
Torgler, Ernst 239
Tornow, Fritz 952
‘total war’ 705-6, 745-7, 749-51, 808-10, 854-60
Toulon 866
trade unionism 38, 178, 246, 269, 276, 288-9
trains:
H’s special 327, 434, 478, 515-16, 544, 556, 568, 581-2, 607,
730, 894, 895
proposed double-decker expresses 709
‘Traitors before the People’s Court’ (film) 847
Traunstein, POW camp 68-9
treaties:
Berlin (1926) 331

Brest-Litovsk (1918) 152

German-Soviet Treaty of Friendship (1939) 517

Locarno (1925) 182, 337, 350-51, 352, 354

Rapallo (1922) 182, 331

St Germain (1919) 401

Versailles (1919) 86-7, 89, 90, 93, 151, 298, 331, 332, 334, 338,
350, 353, 420, 470, 475, 511

Treblinka extermination camp 262, 469, 688, 697, 715, 775
Treitschke, Heinrich von 145

Tresckow, Henning von:
background 819
and ‘Commissar Order’ 601-2, 819
July 1944 assassination plot 818, 820
Kluge’s sympathy for 865
March 1943 assassination plot 821
Operation Valkyrie 826-7
opposition to H 819, 824, 825, 826
suicide 846

Treviranus, Gottfried 208

Tripartite Pact (1940) 580, 584, 603, 604-5
Tripolitania 591

‘Triumph of the Will’ (film) 319
Trondheim 553

Trotsky, Leon 49

Trott zu Solz, Adam von 824
Tscherniakowski, Ivan 879

Tubeuf, Anton Freiherr von 59

Tunis 581, 730, 736, 743, 757, 760-61
Tunisia 732

Turkey 487, 580, 585, 586, 862, 867
Typhoon, Operation 644, 649-50, 652

Tyrol 151, 183-4, 426, 540, 799, 964

U-boats:
bases 863
building of 550, 889
losses in Atlantic 761, 861, 863
successes in Atlantic 645, 717, 743
UFA (film company) 193
Uffing 132-3
Ukraine:
Battle of Kiev 632, 643-4, 648
German loss of 775, 797-8
German occupation 644
German plans to take 590, 629, 630, 636, 639, 642, 643
Nazi atrocities 634-5, 674-5, 715, 826, 827
and Poland 481, 516-17
and Romania 619
Ulex, Wilhelm 524, 525
Ulm 804
‘Ultra’ decoder 761
‘unconditional surrender’ terms 754, 822, 959, 962-3

unemployment 191, 196, 222, 261, 349, 372, 650
‘Law for Reduction of Unemployment’ (1933) 270

United Patriotic Associations (Vereinigte Vaterlandische Verbande)
194

United States of America:
air-raids on Germany 801, 861, 894, 900-901
and Allied assault on Germany 892-3, 908, 914, 919, 935, 961
and Allied invasion 805-6, 808, 879
American Jewry 576-7, 764, 862
and Ardennes offensive 883, 884—5
armaments programme 712
arrival of American troops in European war 730

atomic weapon research 874

boycott of German goods 285, 286

economic power of 184, 551

enters war after Pearl Harbor (1941) 606—7, 656-8, 660

German declaration of war against (11 December 1941) 658-60,
690, 693-4

grant of destroyers to Britain 570-71, 580

Himmler’s overtures to 860

isolationism 551, 552, 571

Jewish emigration to 463

landing in Italy 769

looming threat of 563, 571, 579, 580, 655, 702, 712

naval power 563, 656, 712, 761

Wall Street Crash (1929) 193, 195, 196

universities:
and alleged negative characteristics of Jews 451-2
purges of 291-2

Upper Silesia 266, 697, 709, 899, 911, 914
UrbSys, Joseph 481

Urfahr, Linz 14, 16-17

USPD (Independent Social Democrats) 66-7, 69
Ustasha Movement 607

V1 flying bombs 791-2, 803, 806-7, 808, 809
V2 rockets 791, 810, 873, 878

Valencia 384

Valkyrie, Operation 826-7, 829, 833-41, 846
van der Lubbe, Marinus 274

Vatican 290, 295, 769, 776

VB see Volkischer Beobachter

Veesenmeyer, Edmund 795, 876, 877
vegetarianism 160, 212, 214, 380, 625, 720

Veldenstein, near Nuremberg 612
venereal disease 23

Venezuela 453

Verdi, Giuseppe 20, 21

Verdun 107

Vereinigte Vaterlandische Verbande (United Patriotic Associations)
194

Versailles Treaty (1919):
breaches of 334, 338
concessions on 298
Erzberger and 86-7
H’s attacks on 89, 90, 93, 353
H’s desire to overthrow 151
and Memelland 475
and Polish Corridor 470
provides basis for H’s demands 511
revision of 331, 350, 420
and Saarland 332

Viaz’ma 649
Vichy government 561, 578, 579, 580-83
Victor Emmanuel III, King of Italy 762, 768, 769

Vienna:
antisemitism in 24, 32, 37, 42-3
Central Cemetery 221
coup attempt (1944) 841
Court Opera House 19, 20
deportation of Jews 574, 575, 595, 686, 687, 689, 691
H first visits (1906/7) 13-15
Heldenplatz 413
H’s hatred for 7, 47-8
H’s indolent lifestyle in 16-20
H’s triumphant arrival after Anschlufs 413-14
Jewish community 32, 40-41, 42-3, 415-16, 464

Meidling hostel 30-31
Men’s Home, Meldemannstrafse 22, 29, 31-4, 40-41, 43-5, 50
middle-class morality 23
multi-lingualism 27
Nazi terror wave 415-16, 450, 452
Popular Opera House 21
population 401
prostitution 23-4
Red Army takes 918, 919
‘Reich Theatre Week’ 490
St Maria am Gestade church 19
St Stephen’s cathedral 19
Schlofs Belvedere 603
sixth district 25
Vienna Academy of Fine Arts 13, 14, 19-20, 26
Vienna Conservatoire 19, 20
Vienna State Opera 710-711
Vilna 626, 671, 814
Vimy 58
Vinnitsa 720, 752
Vistula river 499, 517, 521, 575, 868, 888-9, 891
Vitebsk 810, 811
Vogel, Werner 830
Vogler, Albert 243
Volga Germans 683-4
Volga river 630, 683, 719, 722, 723
Volkdeutsche 153
volkisch movement:
adulation of H 78, 136, 156, 292
and Einsatzgruppen 618
factionalism 132-3, 139-42, 143-4, 145, 156, 162, 164-6, 185
in Franconia 110, 132-3

and genocide 149
and ‘heroic-leader’ idea 157, 185
H’s scorn for volkisch sects 29
H’s supremacy in 194
loses figurehead of Ludendorff 165-6
in Munich 81-2, 84, 95, 121, 132-3, 136
and National Socialism 81
and Otto Dickel 101
in Thuringia 163
Volkischer Beobachter (VB; newspaper):
and assassination attempt (1939) 546
bought by NSDAP 95
and car-ownership 271
and Fthrer cult 111
funding of 100, 117, 118
and German Workers’ Party mass meeting 87
H’s contributions 97, 99, 162, 180, 217, 225
and H’s leadership of NSDAP 103-4
lifting of ban on (1925) 162
and Mein Kampf 147
and Otto Dickel 101
and refounding of NSDAP 162
and Reichstag fire (1933) 276
renaming of 82
and Strasser’s resignation of party offices 248
and Wall Street Crash 196

Volkischer Block 132-3, 141-2, 144, 164, 190
Volksauto 271
Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz (Ethnic German Self-Protection) 519

Volksgemeinschaft (‘national community’) 182, 198, 203-4, 272, 323,
327

Volkssturm (people’s militia) 858-9, 860, 925, 934, 937

Volkswagen 490
‘People’s Car’ 628

Volkswehr (People’s Defence) 858
Voronezh 719

Vo, Erich 939, 941

Vyschinsky, Andrei 845

Waffen-SS 397, 618, 759, 769-70, 891, 913
Wagener, Otto 210-11, 213
Wagner family 490
Wagner, Adolf 278, 310, 457
Wagner, Eduard 520, 638, 651, 843, 846
Wagner, Gerhard 344-5, 347, 530-31
Wagner, Richard:
and Bayreuth 116
effect of music on H 160
and ‘great men’ theory 157
H’s admiration for 11, 12, 20-21, 33, 115, 157, 701, 710, 800
Wagnerian redeemer-figure 851
The Flying Dutchman 13, 490
Gotterdammerung 490, 566
Lohengrin 12, 20
Rienzi 491
Tristan and Isolde 13, 490
The Valkyrie 490
Wagner, Robert 578
Wagner, Siegfried 116, 376
Wagner, Walter 948
Wagner, Winifred 116, 194, 218, 376, 491
Wahrmund, Adolf 91
Wall Street Crash (1929) 193, 195, 196
Walter, Bruno 709-10

Wannsee 690, 829, 920

Wannsee Conference (January 1942) 690, 695, 696-7
Warburg (bank) 451

Warlimont, Walter 567-8, 599, 602, 624

Warm Springs, Georgia 918

Warmbold, Hermann 232

Warsaw:
German forces evacuate 890
ghetto 579, 759, 764, 965
Ribbentrop visits (January 1939) 475
rising (1944) 868
shelling of 516, 557
Soviet advance on 811, 888

Warthegau 517, 526-7, 575, 677, 681-2, 688-9, 776, 890, 891, 894
Weber, Christian 97-8

Weber, Friedrich 134, 135

Weber, Max xxviii-xxix

Wedekind, Frank 23

‘Weekend Crisis’ (20-22 May 1938) 426-7

Wehrmacht:
and the Anschlufg 410-11
Ardennes offensive 884
atrocities in Poland 523
backing of genocidal programme 668, 672
ban on intermarriage 343
and Battle of Britain 570
and battle for Stalingrad 737
‘Case Green’ 418
‘Case X’ 384
and deportation of Jews 595, 668, 670, 690
directive for liquidation of Czechoslovakia (21 October 1938) 473
drive for Moscow and Leningrad 639, 648, 649, 702
establishment of 305, 335-6

H takes over leadership 397-8, 422-3, 498
H’s proclamation (March 1945) 910
invasion of Soviet Union 600-601, 623, 626, 635, 749
last report 963
losses 711, 749, 861, 867
occupation of Italy 773
and opening of Eastern Front 567-8, 589, 598
and Operation Bagration 811
and Operation Citadel 774
proclamation on H’s death 959
rearmament 384, 386
and Soviet counter-offensives 879, 889-90
spring offensive (1942) 710-11
and SS 519, 523-4, 671-2, 673-4
and V1 attacks 807
weakness in organization 809
winter crisis on Eastern Front (1941-2) 662 see also German
army; Reichswehr
Wehrmacht High Command (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht; OKW):
aligned with genocidal programme 672, 699
and Allied invasion 804, 813
Ardennes offensive 881
battle for Stalingrad 727
change of command (June 1944) 813-14
flawed communications with armed forces 553-4, 755, 804
and German surrender 962, 963
and occupation of Italy 772
and Operation Barbarossa 600-601, 626-7, 645, 646-8
and Operation Citadel 755, 756, 766
Operations Staff 604, 607, 624, 636, 638, 766, 772
spring offensive (1942) 711
transfer to new headquarters (April 1945) 924, 930, 937, 953
weakness 788, 809
winter crisis on Eastern Front (1941-42) 652

Weichs, Freiherr Maximilian von 525, 727, 728, 734

Weidling, Helmuth 934, 939, 941, 952, 953, 954, 959
Weilheim 877

Weimar:
conferences 143
party rally (July 1926) 172-3, 174, 180

Weimar Republic:
Constitution 199, 235, 252-3, 255, 276, 278
crisis-ridden 110
democracy 98, 178, 192, 199, 226
disintegration of 206, 222, 224, 226, 230-31, 258, 262
Ebert’s presidency 165
economic crisis 190-92, 372
electoral system 277
fall of Muller administration 199
‘golden years’ 190
Hindenburg elected President 165
H’s public attacks 202, 206
protest movements 196, 209
relations with Soviet Union 331
self-destructiveness 199
unique circumstances allowing H’s rise to power 256-9
welfare state 191

Weifs, Rudolf 952

Weizsacker, Ernst von:
ambassador to Switzerland 331
appoints von Etzdorf 536
and declaration of war on United States 659
on H’s absence from Berlin 492
and H’s Czech policy 418, 426, 430, 439, 477
and Molotov 584
and Munich Agreement negotiations (1938) 435, 439, 442, 444
and opening of Eastern Front 566
and opening of Western Front 541
opposition to H 542

and Polish crisis (1939) 500-501

and Polish non-aggression pact (1934) 331

and Soviet non-aggression pact (1939) 488, 489
and Spain 582

Welczek, Johannes von 433

Wels, Otto 282, 289

Weltpolitik 154

Wenck, Walther 891, 927, 930, 931, 934, 935, 939-40, 941-2, 946,
952, 953

Wendt, Hans Friedrich 206, 208

Werwolf (Fihrer Headquarters) 720, 723, 725, 752

Werwolf (quasi-guerrilla organization) 917

Wesel 892, 893

‘Weser Exercise’ (‘Wesertibing’) 552-4

West Prussia 519, 522

Westerplatte peninsula 508

Westphalia 918

‘Westwall’ 424-5, 427, 431, 702, 879, 882

White Book (British government) 333-4

‘White Rose’ opposition-group 740-41

Wiedemann, Fritz 54, 324-5, 326, 340, 356, 375, 393, 397

Wikingbund 120

Wilhelm II, Kaiser 731

Wilhelmshaven 704

Willikens, Werner 320, 321, 323

Wilson, Sir Horace 439-40, 441, 444, 509-10

Windau (Ventspils), Latvia 499

‘Winter Aid’ campaign 395, 648, 665, 728

Winter Olympics, Garmisch-Partenkirchen (1936) 348, 351

Wirth, Joseph 98

Wittenberg 935

Witzleben, Erwin von 544, 834, 846, 847-8

Wochenspriiche (Weekly Maxims) 681

Wohrden 191-2

Wolf (dog) 145

Wolf (puppy) 903, 923

Wolf, Hugo 701

Wolf, Johanna 923, 925

Wolf, Karl Hermann 32

Wolf, Paula (née Hitler; H’s sister) 3, 5-6, 10, 14, 15, 16, 34

Wolff, Karl 465, 961

wolfram 863

Wolf’s Lair (Wolfsschanze; Fithrer Headquarters) 624-6, 700-701,
720, 736, 742, 748, 792-3, 814-15, 829, 833, 850, 879-80, 881

women:

conscription for work 749, 857
H’s attitude towards 12-13, 22-3, 55, 175, 212, 218-19, 325, 378

work-creation schemes 266, 270
Workers’ Committee for a Good Peace 82

working classes:
H’s sense of superiority to 36
in Munich 82, 92
and national socialism 167
‘racial inferiority’ of English lower class 692
Social Democracy and 36
support for Nazi Party 205

‘Working Community of the North- and West-German Gaue of the
NSDAP’ 168-9, 170, 171, 201

‘Working Community of the Patriotic Fighting Associations’
(Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Vaterlandischen Kampfverbande) 120

‘working towards the Fuhrer’ concept xxix—xxx, xl, 262, 320-23,
360, 368, 371, 383, 421-2, 451, 463, 515, 526, 534, 572, 676,
71%, 757, 792, 965

working-class movement 36, 274

World Disarmament Conference (Geneva, 1932-34) 254, 297-300

World Economic Conference (London, 1933) 290

Wriezen 908

Wuppertal-Barmen 762

Wirttemberg 227-8, 278

Wurzburg 894

Yalta Conference (1945) 893, 904

Yorck von Wartenburg, Peter Graf 823-4, 846, 847
Young, Owen D. 193

Young Plan 183, 193, 196, 198, 199

Ypres 53, 58

Yugoslavia 487, 585, 603-5, 607-8, 609-10, 961

Z-Plan 471, 550

Zagreb 607

Zakreys, Frau (Viennese landlady) 18, 19, 21, 26
Zander, Wilhelm 952

Zaporozhye 772, 774

Zeitz, Thuringia 100, 102

Zeitzler, Kurt:
and battle for Stalingrad 728, 729, 733, 734, 737
dismissal 814
and dismissal of Manstein 797
doubts H’s word 786

nervous breakdown 813-14
and Operation Bagration 810
and Operation Citadel 756, 766
promoted to General of the Infantry 726
Zentrum:
Briining and 199
dissolution 290
and Enabling Act (1933) 263, 281-2
possible coalition with NSDAP 238, 263
Reichstag elections 204-5, 232, 241-2, 277
support of democracy 258
and vote of no confidence in government 240
weakness of 198
Zhukov, Georgi 888, 892, 920, 934, 935, 958, 963
Ziegenberg 882, 888, 894
Zionism 43, 330, 453
Zitomir 623
Zoppot 516
Zossen 536, 542, 543, 605, 895, 920
Zurich 118

Zyklon-B (poison gas) 687

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